2025-08-14 12:28:45
“You have found an intermediate space… where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his transcendent portrait of the transition from sleep to wakefulness. The experience of waking — that phase transition between the liquid phantasmagoria of the unconscious and the solidity of conscious life — reveals the mind to itself. “All the world is mind,” the teenage Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. To watch the world come awake is to contact the essence of its worldness, to begin apprehending the majesty and mystery of what makes this third-rate rock an irreplaceable wonder.
Marc Martin conjures up the magic of this liminality in Dawn (public library) — a lush watercolor serenade to life coming alive on the threshold between night and day, this primeval conversation between our living planet and its dying star.
Half a century after artist Uri Shulevitz’s watercolor masterpiece of the same title, Martin tessellates morning’s mosaic of wonder — the dragonfly shimmering in the reeds, the dandelion haloed by the golden light, the trees swaying against the glowing sky, the songbird sounding its first note of day.
Couple Dawn with Italian artist Alessandro Sanna’s watercolor serenade to the seasons, then revisit Martin’s painted love letter to starling murmurations.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-08-12 06:40:21
We build our lives around structures of certainty — houses to live in, marriages to love in, ideologies to think in — and yet some primal part of us knows that none abides, knows that we pay for these comforting illusions with our very aliveness.
Wonder — that edge state on the rim of understanding, where the mind touches mystery — is our best means of loving the world more deeply. It asks of us the courage of uncertainty because it is a form of deep play and play, unlike games, is inherently open-ended, without purpose or end goal, governed not by the will to win a point but by the willingness to surrender to a locus of experience and be transformed by it.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer celebrates this lens-widening, life-deepening property of wonder in her incantation of a poem “Intention”:
INTENTION
by Rosemerry Wahtola TrommerTo wonder. To wonder with no plan
for where it might lead. No strategy
for arrival. No finish line. No pot
of gold. No perfect score. No striving for.
To wonder. To wonder the way a small child
might wonder when seeing a roly poly for the first time —
oh, look at all those legs. Look at how
it curls! Look how it moves again. Feel
how light it is in the palm. Feel how
it tickles as it moves. Imagine
an awareness that new meeting a life form that old.
Can I be that new as I meet this infinite world?
To wonder not just with my mind
but with my belly. To let every neuron
spark. To notice where there is a channel
and imagine the great wing of life
is scraping it clean so the stream might flow
in new ways. To wonder beyond the edge
of the known, and in that spaciousness, play.
Couple with Mario Benedetti’s enlivening poem “A Defense of Joy,” then revisit Johan Huizinga’s classic century-old meditation on how play became the fulcrum of civilization and Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-08-09 13:17:35
Steps are events, experiments, miniature rebellions against gravity and chance. With each step, we fall and then we catch ourselves, we choose to go one way and not another. The foot falls and worlds of possibility rise in its shadow. Every step remaps the psychogeography of the walker. Every step in space is also a step in time, slicing through the twilight between the half-fathomed past and the unfathomed future — a verse in the poetry of prospection. We walk the world to discover it and in the process discover ourselves.
Craig Mod was nineteen when he moved from small-town America to Japan’s majestic Kii Peninsula and began walking, only to find himself face to face with the questions he had tried to leave behind — what it means to forgive, what it takes to constellate a family beyond biology, how to live with the ghosts that haunt the history of the heart and the history of the world. These questions quiver alive in Things Become Other Things (public library) — part memoir of the search for belonging, part love letter to his childhood best friend, who “bled out on a dirt yard under the stars” when the boys were teenagers, part record of alchemizing loss into a largeness of being by learning “to walk, and walk well, and witness the people along the way.”
Craig considers the primal nature of “this simple impulse to traverse dirt, to push on the edges of what’s known to us,” the strangeness of being impelled “to walk and walk alone and do so for days and weeks and months at a time”:
I’ve come to crave the solitude and asceticism of these solo walks. There is no quieter place on earth than the third hour of a good long day of walking. It’s alone in this space, this walk-induced hypnosis, that the mind is finally able to receive the strange gifts and charities of the world.
In a sentiment evocative of Nabokov’s insistence that “an active and creative reader is a rereader,” he adds:
I’ve come to realize the only true walk is the re-walk. You cannot know a place without returning. And even then, once isn’t enough. That’s why I’m back. Back on the Peninsula. Walking these roads I’ve walked before. It’s only through time and distance and effort — concerted, present effort, controlled attention, a gentle and steady gaze upon it all — that you begin to understand old connections, old wounds. That the shape of once-dark paths becomes clear.
Over and over he confronts the old wound of his origins — carried by “someone nameless, faceless, someone pregnant at thirteen,” raised by a mother whose husband left her shortly after the adoption to become a halfway father flitting in and out of Craig’s childhood, too absent to be a parent, too present to be a stranger. Looking back on the longing to break free from his addiction to anger and blame, Craig writes:
How could I be sure I was free? So I walked. I walk. I walk and I walk and I walk and feel the air of our town leave my cells and be replaced by the air and ideas of a different time and place. The more I breathe this Peninsula air, the more I realize that it would have been so easy to have elevated my father as a child. This shocks me, the first time I feel this on the road: the space in my heart for forgiveness — forgiveness! The moment I felt that was like getting hit in the head with a basketball — a freakish pang, a dull ache in the skull. I almost fell into a bush. I was hyperventilating — realizing my heart had expanded in some immeasurable, beyond-physics way that hearts can expand, and in that expansion I had new space. There’s a word in Japanese that sums up this feeling better than anything in English: yoyū. A word that somehow means: the excess provided when surrounded by a generous abundance. It can be applied to hearts, wallets, Sunday afternoons, and more… This extra space, this yoyū, this abundance… carried with it patience and — gasp — maybe even… love?
Rising from the pages is a prayer for abundance against the backdrop of all that is taken away, an insistence on the possibility of finding beauty amid the ruins of our hopes. As he walks, Craig encounters “moss lush enough to lie down on naked and wilt in reverence”; he watches mountain crabs move like Claymation as they emerge from the wet forest at sunrise “as if birthed by the light of day”; he comes face to face with the unblinking kamoshika — the Japanese goat-like antelope, exuding “an aura of magic in how fast and sure-footed it is,” this most alien and holiest of forest animals; he feels the primal consolation of his own animal nature, this biped whose peripatetic balance has been honed by myriad exquisite evolutionary adaptations, tiny structures shaped over eons to do one thing perfectly, elaborate chemistries mixed in the cauldron of time to translate the laws of physics into flesh:
I think about how a walk begins, with balance, in the ear, vestibular, a few feet above the earth… Endolymph, a potassium-heavy fluid, oozes inside the so-called bony and membranous labyrinthine canals of the inner ear…. inside [which] gelatinous bulbs called cupula, attached to stereocilia, detect the sloshing of our endolymph. The body moves, the endolymph splashes, heeds the laws of gravity. The stereocilia bend and transmit details of the bend — how far, how quickly, which orientation — to the cerebellum, the brain-nugget secreted at the back of the noggin. The cerebellum decodes the signals, translates, makes a follow-up microsecond game plan.
The great reward is that each step can be such a cosmos of complexity and at the same time lead to such simple, elemental truths. Having distilled the core tenet of a good walk to “real-time observation of unfiltered life,” having observed the core tenet of life in the Kii Peninsula — “a pervasive care throughout generations, a sense of knowing your happiness and health are intertwingled with those of your neighbor” — Craig captures an evanescent moment shimmering with the eternal:
Silent morning, abundant sunlight, abundant life. Thinking about this care. Water in the fields rippling in the wind. Mountains of Kii all around, a silent sloshing in my head, keeping the sky up and the ground down.
Traversing these enchanted landscapes via historic routes and backroads, passing through small towns vanishing before his eyes with depopulation, staying in thousand-year-old temples, he meets and walks with people who end up becoming family — father-figures, brother-figures, elderly innkeepers who put the hardest truths in simple words annealed in the hearth of living. One tells him of the young woman who wandered in years earlier looking for work and turned into a daughter. “Time passes, life moves, and that’s what happens,” the old man tells him. “Things become… other things.” Looking back on half a lifetime of walking his own way to belonging, Craig reflects:
Somehow as an adult I’ve managed to attract and surround myself with these people, these beacons of good… I love them so much that my bones ache — ache because I know I’ll lose them someday. I will follow them anywhere. Together we walk in the near-frozen morning air and the sun rises. Light works its way across the rippling peaks of the Peninsula. Feeling returns to hands, to feet, to hearts. The mind moves once again. We carry our lives on our backs and traverse the spine of the world, no humans for miles, no routes down, just forward or back, the beast below always shifting, always ready to heave us off.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-08-05 04:09:37
Growing up in Bulgaria, in a city teeming in stray dogs and cars, I was deeply distressed by the sight of each dead animal in the streets between home and school — deaths I could not prevent and could not bear. To cope with the aching helplessness, I developed a private superstition: If I touched each of the vertical bars on every fence along my walk, no dog would die. Sometimes I ran to touch as many bars as possible in as little time as possible, the impact bruising and callusing my fingers. Dogs continued dying. I continued doing it. When the school year ended, I was sent to my grandmother’s house in rural Bulgaria, where every night I watched her say prayers to a god she believed would protect us from harm. Harm came anyway. To this day she continues praying.
It can be hard to bear, how the cosmos went from hydrogen to the double helix by its own insentient laws, forged from the iron rib of dying stars creatures capable of the Benedictus and the atomic bomb, hurled ice ages and earthquakes at the rocky body of a world we now walk in skins and nervous systems over which have had no say, born into families and eras we have not chosen. Somehow we must hold all this choicelessness — hold the knowledge that any synch of chance could unseam a life — and still do laundry, still make art, still love. How understandable, how human, the yearning for an organizing principle more comprehensible and therefore more subject to control than chance, for some great hand to align the dice of the universe in our favor, for a magic wand.
And yet as we lean on our crutches of magical thinking, we forget that we are hobbling through a reality already full of magic — hummingbirds and ghost pipes, cordyceps and cosmic rays.
No one has Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934–December 20, 1996) in an unpublished 1979 typescript found among his papers at the Library of Congress under the heading “Where to file? Ideas riding?”
Nearly two decades before he formulated his superb “Baloney Detection Kit” in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark — the benediction of reality completed just before that chance mutation of cells claimed his life — he writes:
“Superstition [is] cowardice in the presence of the Divine.” So said Theophrastus, a contemporary of Aristotle and Alexander. We live in a universe where atoms are made in the stars; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Galaxy; where matter can be put together in so subtle a way as to become self-aware; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times; a universe of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies; where there may be black holes and other universes and intelligent beings so far beyond us that their technology will seem to us indistinguishable from magic. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor imperfect and incomplete surely. But the best means to understand the world that we know. There is no aspect of nature which fails to reveal a deep mystery, to touch our sense of awe and wonder. Theophrastus was right. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who wish to pretend to non-existent knowledge and control and a Cosmos centered on human beings, will prefer superstition. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where It differs profoundly from our wishes and prejudices, to those people belongs the future. Superstitions may be comforting for a while. But, because they avoid rather than confront the world, they are doomed. The future belongs to those able to learn, to change, to accommodate to this exquisite Cosmos that we have been privileged to inhabit for a brief moment.
Couple with Sagan on how to live with the unknown, then revisit the story of how Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion while defending his mother in a witchcraft trial.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-08-01 04:08:52
It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone cave housing three pounds of pink flesh laced with one hundred trillion synapses that still sing with pleasure and awe when touched by the wildness of the world.
Even as the merchants of silicon and code try to render us disembodied intellects caged behind screens, something in our animal body knows where we came from and where we belong.
“Our origins are of the earth,” Rachel Carson wrote. “And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.” A century before her, William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922) — another of humanity’s great writers devoted to rewilding the human spirit — captured the essence of what science now calls “soft fascination”: the way our brains and bodies respond when we immerse ourselves in the natural world. In a passage from his altogether wonderful 1893 book Idle Days in Patagonia (public domain), Hudson writes:
What has truly entered our soul and become psychical is our environment — that wild nature in which and to which we were born at an inconceivably remote period, and which made us what we are. It is true that we are eminently adaptive, that we have created, and exist in some sort of harmony with new conditions, widely different from those to which we were originally adapted; but the old harmony was infinitely more perfect than the new, and if there be such a thing as historical memory in us, it is not strange that the sweetest moment in any life, pleasant or dreary, should be when Nature draws near to it, and, taking up her neglected instrument, plays a fragment of some ancient melody, long unheard on the earth… Nature has at times this peculiar effect on us, restoring instantaneously the old vanished harmony between organism and environment.
At the end of his life, looking back on how becoming “a better observer” made him “a happier creature,” Hudson writes in his wonderful Book of a Naturalist (public domain):
The power, beauty, and grace of the wild creature, its perfect harmony in nature, the exquisite correspondence between organism, form and faculties, and the environment, with the plasticity and intelligence for the readjustment of the vital machinery, daily, hourly, momentarily, to meet all changes in the conditions, all contingencies; and thus, amidst perpetual mutations and conflict with hostile and destructive forces, to perpetuate a form, a type, a species for thousands and millions of years! … [One feels] the wonderfulness and eternal mystery of life itself; this formative, informing energy — this flame that burns in and shines through the case, the habit, which in lighting another dies, and albeit dying yet endures for ever; and the sense, too, that this flame of life was one, and of my kinship with it in all its appearances, in all organic shapes, however different from the human… the roe-deer, the leopard and wild horse, the swallow cleaving the air, the butterfly toying with a flower, and the dragon-fly dreaming on the river; the monster whale, the silver flying-fish, and the nautilus with rose and purple tinted sails spread to the wind.
Tuning into this primal resonance between us and the rest of nature is the mightiest act of unselfing I know — a vital quieting of our ruminative self-reference that is the dynamo of most of our suffering. Perhaps to be a happier creature means simply to be more of a creature — a life-form among life-forms, alive only because countless other creatures died along the way to perfect this form in a world that didn’t have to be beautiful, didn’t even have to exist.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-07-30 01:35:02
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that allows us to navigate uncertainty, given that uncertainty is the pulse-beat of our lives, fairy tales are not — as J.R.R. Tolkien so passionately insisted — only for children. They are more than fantasy, more than fiction, shimmering with a surreality so saturated that it becomes a mirror for what is realest in us, what we are often yet to see. They enchant us with their strangeness because we are largely strangers to ourselves, ambivalent in our yearning for transformation, for redemption, for homecoming, restless in our longing to unmask the face of love and unglove the hand of mercy. They ask us to believe in magic and reward our trust with truth.
Fairy tales are above all in service of life’s most difficult, most unfinishable task — knowing who we are and what we want. Their most revelatory function is to remind us that, because we know ourselves only incompletely, we don’t always know what we are looking for until we find it, often by way of getting lost, or until it finds us, often in a guise we don’t immediately recognize as the very thing we long for.
That is what Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) explores in her excellent posthumous essay collection The Unforgivable: And Other Writings (public library).
Observing that many fairy tales “end like a ring right where they began,” she writes:
In a fairy tale, there are no roads. You start out walking, as if in a straight line, and eventually that line reveals itself to be a labyrinth, a perfect circle, a spiral, or even a star — or a motionless point the soul never leaves, even as body and mind take what appears to be an arduous journey. You seldom know where you are traveling, or even what you are traveling toward, for you cannot know, in reality, what the water ballerina, or the singing apple, or the fortune-telling bird may be. Or the word to conjure with: the abstract, culminating word that is stronger than any certainty.
Through these routeless convolutions, we map the terra incognita of your own interior world. In a passage evocative of the Chinese notion of wu-wei — “trying not to try” — Campo considers the paradox of self-discovery:
Since the thing you start out looking for cannot and must not have a face, how can you recognize the means to reach it until you’ve reached it? How can the destination ever be anything but an apparent destination?
[…]
No one arrives at the enlightenment he sets out to seek. It will come to him in its own sweet time. Thus the destination walks side by side with the traveler… Or it hovers behind him… In truth, the traveler has always had it within him and is only moving toward the motionless center of his life: the antrum near the spring, the cave — where childhood and death, in one another’s arms, confide the secret they share. The idea of travel, effort, and patience is paradoxical, yes, but it is also exact. For in this paradox, we stumble on the intersection of eternity and time.
It is hardly surprising that, in their central project of loosening the clutch of certainties we call a self, fairy tales blur the ordinary experience of time — time, after all, is the substance we are made of.
In a passage brimming with the musicality Maurice Sendak considered the key to great storytelling, Campo — the daughter of a musician and a composer — writes:
The geometry of time and space is abolished as if by magic. You walk for hours in a circle, or conversely, you reach the edge of the infinite in a few quick steps. It isn’t our state of heightened vigilance that casts a spell on the world around us; it is a much more recondite correspondence between discovering and letting ourselves be discovered — between giving shape and taking shape. Everything already was, but today it truly is. Today any peasant, pointing in any direction, will sound like a gnome or a fairy, will gesture at the path you nearly took a thousand times without suspecting it. The path that leads to four indescribably white springs suspended on the hillside, protected, for a hundred paces or a thousand miles, by fields of tall fragrant grasses; or to the royal tomb hidden by the Etruscans in a cave now covered with brambles, out of which white hounds and a man the size of an ifrit, carrying a shotgun, emerge; or down below the ridge secretly lighted by the sun, at a bend in the riverbank so deep it casts the whole hanging tangle of pink roots into shadow. Velvet water that looks motionless and yet moves. Water that runs off into the beyond without flowing, so that it would be enough just to follow it, for that beyond which is always forbidden, always intimated in our dreams, is transpiring here and now.
I am thinking now of Hannah Arendt’s magnificent meditation on love: “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” she wrote. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.” Perhaps this is why love is the central axis of most fairy tales, why love in real life has a certain dreamlike quality, why both love and dreams are ways of getting to know the stranger in us. “In each of us there is another whom we do not know,” Carl Jung wrote, “[who] speaks to us in dreams.”
There is the same dreamlike quality and the same capacity for revelation in the state we enter once a fairy tale ejects us from time and thrusts into nowness. Campo paints the dreamscape we enter:
Quick glances direct our steps, hands point beyond the thresholds. Behind windowpanes so clear they blind us move the figures of the ones we loved, the ones we’ve lost, who, behold, stand up from the piano bench or arrange fruit on a table. It all unfolds like a scroll from a mouth known yet unknown, a dark and luminous sentence, an irrefutable commentary set down between past and future.
In being both a portal between the known and the unknown and a still point between past and future, fairy tales help us discern our own nature by guiding us toward the deepest truths of who we are and helping us apply them to the mystery of being alive — a nonlinear process the fruits of which we call maturity. Campo writes:
Maturity is not the result of persuasion, much less an intellectual epiphany. It is a sudden, I would almost like to say biological, collapse. It is a point that must be reached by all the senses at once if truth is going to be turned into nature.
Complement with Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear and Anaïs Nin on the meaning of maturity, then revisit the greatest illustrations from 200 years of Brothers Grimm fairy tales.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.