themarginalian.org

Why Are We Not Better Than We Are

It felt like those scenes of astronauts who, having finally rattled free of the earth's atmosphere, slip into the stillness of space. Except we weren't in space. We were on earth — finally, really on earth.

whyisthisinteresting

The Competitive Fly Fishing Edition

The fish choosing to move to the water-air interface, and pierce it with its mouth, to put its water-dwelling self into our world, is something magical.

themarginalian.org

J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life

Enchantment — wherever we may find it (as in nature, poetry, music), or wherever it might find us (as in love) — is not escapism but a truer realism than cynicism, pessimism, or optimism. In allowing us to touch the extraordinary, enchantment — which asks of the courage of the encounter — returns us to our lives more in love with the so-called ordinary world, which, we must also not forget, is itself an extraordinary triumph against probability.

notboring.co

Everyone is Reading Lonesome Dove

I gasped and sobbed and clutched the book when it was over. I was so thankful for the reminder that reading can still be like this, that the realm of the unread always holds, somewhere, the exact thing I'm looking for, whatever it is.

themarginalian.org

Blackie & Co.: A Blackbird’s Lesson in Friendship

To extend it across the barrier of biology and sentience, to another creature endowed with a wholly other consciousness, partakes of the miraculous.

themarginalian.org

G.K. Chesterton on the Dandelion and the Meaning of Life

No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.

themarginalian.org

From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life

Pulsating beneath it all is an insistence that it is not too late to change the catastrophic course of ecology, that it can only be done by listening closely and creatively to nature's own silent lessons, intimating that our mightiest instrument of resilience is rapturous wonder.

themarginalian.org

How to See a Bird: Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s Exquisite Illustrated Field Guide to the Wonder of the Winged

We forget, and need constant reminding, that the fruit of wonder as well as its fulcrum is not knowledge — none of our discoveries have kept three billion birds from vanishing between Carson's lifetime and ours — but love.

themarginalian.org

Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary

We do not need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms.

themarginalian.org

The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”

At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.

themarginalian.org

Pi and the Seductions of Infinity

An irrational number — a number that cannot be expressed as a fraction, the ratio between two whole numbers — π unmoors our basic intuitions about reality with its disquieting whisper of an infinity beyond the grasp of reason.

3quarksdaily.com

A Thread On Absorption And Immersion

those moments when our sudden stupefaction facing the world grows so profound that a pillow of air seems to lodge itself in our throats and we suddenly notice we haven't even taken a breath in tens of seconds.