2025-09-29 00:06:00
A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life as the pages of time keep turning is the great creative act we are here for. Like evolution, like Leaves of Grass, it is the work of continual revision, not toward greater perfection but toward greater authenticity, which is at bottom the adaptation of the self to the soul and the soul to the world.
In one of the essays found in his exquisite 1877 collection Birds and Poets (public library | public domain), the philosopher-naturalist John Burroughs (April 3, 1837–March 29, 1921) explores the nature of that creative act through a parallel between poetry and personhood anchored in a brilliant metaphor for the two different approaches to creation. He writes:
There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal. One means the organic, the other inorganic; one means growth, development, life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The hint and model of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective, and philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there is much good literature that is neither the one nor the other distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both. But crystallic beauty or cut and polished gems of thought, the result of the reflex rather than the direct action of the mind, we do not expect to find in the best poems, though they may be most prized by specially intellectual persons. In the immortal poems the solids are very few, or do not appear at all as solids, — as lime and iron, — any more than they do in organic nature, in the flesh of the peach or the apple. The main thing in every living organism is the vital fluids: seven tenths of man is water; and seven tenths of Shakespeare is passion, emotion, — fluid humanity.
This, of course, is what makes identity such a tedious concept — a fixity of past experience and predictive narrative that crystallizes a person’s natural fluidity, makes them impermeable to possibility, and is therefore inherently uncreative. True creativity, Burroughs observes, is rooted in this dynamism, this fluidity, this irrepressible and ever-shifting aliveness:
All the master poets have in their work an interior, chemical, assimilative property… flaming up with electric and defiant power, — power without any admixture of resisting form, as in a living organism.
It can only be so because we are a fractal of nature, the supreme creative agent, whose processes are a ceaseless flow of change and self-revision. Burroughs writes:
The physical cosmos itself is not a thought, but an act. Natural objects do not affect us like well-wrought specimens or finished handicraft, which have nothing to follow, but as living, procreating energy. Nature is perpetual transition. Everything passes and presses on; there is no pause, no completion, no explanation. To produce and multiply endlessly, without ever reaching the last possibility of excellence, and without committing herself to any end, is the law of Nature.
Burroughs sees this as “the essential difference between prose and poetry,” between “the poetic and the didactic treatment of a subject.” A great life, he intimates, is more like a great poem than like a great teaching:
The essence of creative art is always the same; namely, interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didactic or prosaic treatment is fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate and define; but the principle of the former is to flow, to suffuse, to mount, to escape. We can conceive of life only as something constantly becoming. It plays forever on the verge. It is never in loco, but always in transit. Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind; close your hands upon the light, and behold, it is gone.
And yet because these interior movements are fundamentally untranslatable between one consciousness and another, belonging to that region of absolute aloneness that accompanies the singularity of being oneself, there is always an element of the ineffable in all great creative work and all great persons:
There must always be something about a poem, or any work of art, besides the evident intellect or plot of it, or what is on its surface, or what it tells. This something is the Invisible, the Undefined, almost Unexpressed, and is perhaps the best part of any work of art, as it is of a noble personality… As, in the superbest person, it is not merely what he or she says or knows or shows, or even how they behave, but in the silent qualities, like gravitation, that insensibly but resistlessly hold us; so in a good poem, or any other expression of art.
Couple with Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, then revisit Burroughs on the measure of a visionary, the art of noticing, and how to live with the uncertainties of life.
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.
2025-09-26 09:23:58
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E. E. Cummings wrote in his timeless summons for the courage to be yourself. But what does it really mean to be oneself when the self is an ever-moving target of ever-changing sentiments and cells, a figment of fixity to dam the fluidity that carries us along the river of life, to soften the hard fact that we never fully know who we are because we are never one thing long enough. “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion,” Iris Murdoch insisted in her magnificent case for unselfing, and yet we do live out our entire lives in it — the self is our sieve for reality, the sensory organ through which we experience love and politics and the color blue. How to inhabit it with authenticity but without attachment might be the great task of being alive.
The great Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) takes up these immense and intimate questions in The Book of Disquiet (public library) — his posthumously published collection of reflections and revelations partway between autobiography and aphorism, profoundly personal yet shimmering with the universal.
Considering himself “the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it,” with a soul “impatient with itself,” Pessoa writes:
Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.
[…]
Perhaps it’s finally time for me to make this one effort: to take a good look at my life. I see myself in the midst of a vast desert. I tell what I literarily was yesterday, and I try to explain to myself how I got here.
[…]
I retreat into myself, get lost in myself, forget myself in far-away nights uncontaminated by duty and the world, undefiled by mystery and the future.
A generation before the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh lost his self and found himself in a dazzling epiphany at the library, Pessoa recounts one such moment when the veils of the self parted long enough to glimpse the vastness of the unself:
All that I’ve done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I’d always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn’t I.
I’m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being. I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought… This sudden awareness of my true being, of this being that has always sleepily wandered between what it feels and what it sees, weighs on me like an untold sentence to serve.
It’s so hard to describe what I feel when I feel I really exist and my soul is a real entity that I don’t know what human words could define it. I don’t know if I have a fever, as I feel I do, or if I’ve stopped having the fever of sleeping through life. Yes, I repeat, I’m like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, without knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time are not themselves but someone else. I was someone else for a long time — since birth and consciousness — and suddenly I’ve woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up till now.
And yet, like Virginia Woolf’s garden epiphany about the creative spirit and Margaret Fuller’s hilltop unselfing into “the All,” such moments of revelation in which the soul contacts reality are but brief sidewise glances at some elemental truth we cannot bear to look at continuously less we dissolve into it. Pessoa reflects:
To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting notion of the intimate monad, the soul’s magic word. But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It strips us naked of even ourselves.
Complement with Herman Melville on the mystery of what makes us who we are and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the “same” person despite a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, then revisit Jack Kerouac on the self illusion and the “Golden Eternity” found in its wake.
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.
2025-09-23 21:48:23
Pressed between the pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — a favorite book of my childhood, which my grandmother used to read to me and which still dwells in her immense library — is a single yellow leaf, its curved fan almost glowing against a faded illustration of the White Rabbit gazing anxiously at his pocket watch.
I still remember the afternoon I picked it up from under the four majestic ginkgo trees standing sentinel at the northern entrance of Varna’s Sea Garden — the iconic park perched on the cliffs of the Black Sea in my father’s hometown, where my grandparents took me each summer; I still remember the shock of seeing something so strange and beautiful, so unlike my notion of a leaf, and then the gasp of revelation: I suddenly realized that anything — a leaf, a life — can take myriad shapes beyond the standard template, can bend and broaden the Platonic ideal.
The improbable presence of four ancient trees native to Asia in Communist Bulgaria is a microcosm of the story of the ginkgo itself.
Earth’s oldest surviving tree genus, ginkgos were there before the dinosaurs existed, before Africa and South America parted. But after a long epoch of triumph over droughts and floods and mass extinctions, they came teetering on the brink of extinction for reasons entombed in mystery.
Jared Farmer chronicles their evolutionary trajectory in his altogether fascinating book Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (public library):
These ginkgophytes were, in their evolutionary heyday, the foremost innovators of the plant kingdom. They could shed leaves in winter, go dormant in low-light seasons, switch between stub growth and branch growth depending on conditions, and resprout from lignotubers — energy-storing roots — after disturbances. On a prior planet with relatively few tall plants and no fast-growing angiosperms, ginkgophytes achieved dominance as generalists.
As Darwin said, “rarity precedes extinction,” but the duration of rarity varies greatly. Ginkgo is a temporal outlier. Ginkgophytes survived multiple mass extinction events and outlived their original seed dispersers, which might have been carrion-eating animals attracted by the sweet-rotten smell of the fleshy seedcoats. After a long period of glory in the Mesozoic era, ginkgophytes declined in the Cenozoic and dwindled to one species by the ice ages. Ginkgoes disappeared from North America, then Europe, and finally Japan, becoming, by the Pleistocene epoch, mountain refugees in China.
It was there that itinerant Buddhist monks discovered them. Taken both by the trees’ medicinal properties, which had become a staple of Chinese medicine, and by their uncommon beauty, the monks began landscaping Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines all over Japan with ginkgos.
In 1683, the polymathic German naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer set out for Japan under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company. He spent a decade there, then another decade writing the first Western study of Japan’s history, culture, and flora, which included the first botanical description of this singular tree he had encountered in Nagasaki. He gave it the awkward name Ginkgo, likely in error, as the original Japanese name should have been transliterated as ginkio, ginkjo, or ginkyo.
The printed word, like the Internet that succeeded it, is a copying machine for error. The spelling spread across botany until Linnaeus himself adopted it in his taxonomical Bible, relegating Ginkgo biloba — which he had never seen or studied himself — to the appendix of “obscure plants.”
Still, the ginkgo captivated the Western imagination with its striking geometry and its dramatic dance with chlorophyll, casting its spell on masses and monarchs alike.
Among the enchanted was the Duke of Weimer.
When Goethe — the Duke’s personal adviser — encountered the ginkgo at the royal gardens in 1815, it lit him up with a metaphor for the nature of love and the nature of the self, which he rendered in a poem penned in a letter to a friend he may or may not have been in love with, signed with a pressed ginkgo leaf.
GINKGO BILOBA
by Johann Wolfgang von GoetheIn my garden’s care and favor
From the East this tree’s leaf shows
Secret sense for us to savor
And uplifts the one who knows.Is it but one being single
Which as same itself divides?
Are there two which choose to mingle
So that each as one now hides?As the answer to such question
I have found a sense that’s true:
Is it not my songs’ suggestion
That I’m one and also two?
Goethe was by then Europe’s most eminent poet, his verses the era’s equivalent of viral. Just as he had popularized the cloud names we use today, his poem contributed to the ginkgo craze that overtook Europe, then spread to America. Soon, horticulturalists and urban planners all over the Western hemisphere were saturating botanical gardens and city parks with ginkgos. Among them was Anton Novak — the Czech visionary who spent forty-two years dreaming up Bulgaria’s Sea Garden and building it into the most admired urban wilderness of the Balkans, so that a six-year-old girl can pick up a ginkgo leaf a century later and have a revelation that lasts a lifetime.
Meanwhile, geology was in its heyday and evolutionary theory was taking root. Scientists were unearthing ginkgo fossils hundreds of millions of years old, beginning to wonder how the first land plants evolved, beginning to suspect the ancient trees might hold a key to the enigma.
In 1894, Japanese botanist Sakugorō Hirase set out to study the reproduction of ginkgos, which are not “perfect flowers” and therefore produce male and female gametes on separate trees. Under a microscope, Hirase discovered the ginkgo spermatozoid and, with surprise, watched it arrive at the ovum by swimming through the fluid — motility inherited from the marine past of plants, establishing the ginkgo as a primordial species, the missing link between ferns and conifers, and a living fossil, like the dawn redwood, reaching across deep time to bridge our stratum of being with that of the dinosaurs.
Today, ginkgos line the streets of countless cities and rustle in parks all over the world. The oldest survivors in the wild have witnessed the births of major religions and the deaths of massive civilizations. Six ginkgos were among the handful of organisms that survived the bombing of Hiroshima. Long after Hitler and Openheimer have been pressed between the pages of history, the ginkgos are still alive, rising from the ruins of our capacity for destruction by hate as an emblem of our capacity for salvation by love.
Salvation, be it of a species or of a soul, is always anchored in some act of love, and every act of love is at bottom an act of salvation. “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in balancing the equation between love and loss. “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.” Nearly two centuries after Goethe, poet Howard Nemerov lenses this elemental unit of aliveness through the ginkgos:
THE CONSENT
by Howard NemerovLate in November, on a single night
Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand along the walk drop all their leaves
In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as though to time alone: the golden and green
Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.What signal from the stars? What senses took it in?
What in those wooden motives so decided
To strike their leaves, to down their leaves,
Rebellion or surrender? and if this
Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt?
What use to learn the lessons taught by time,
If a star at any time may tell us: Now.
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.
2025-09-20 19:11:21
I spent the summer using the fantastic binomial technique developed by Gianni Rodari — the beloved Italian writer whose stories lit up my Bulgarian childhood — as a creative prompt for poetry, part of the larger binomial two people co-create when their worlds touch each other in a meaningful way. Each week I’d be given two unrelated words and tasked with twining them into a poem.
Summers end. Worlds tilt away from each other, drift apart, resume their orbit, transformed. This is how the final binomial — “dust” and “life” — wrote itself in me, read here by the living poem that is Nick Cave.
ODE TO A GOOD PEN
by Maria PopovaOver and over
we borrow the book of love
from the lending library of the possible
and ask of it
everything,
only to find its pages
blank and beckoning,
impelling us
to keep writing the story
as it keeps changing,
keeps reading us
back to ourselves —
an endless translation
from some other tongue,
unfinished and unfinishable,
written in dust
between endpapers
marbled with life.
Then, “Forgiveness.”
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.
2025-09-17 02:08:02
In the spring of 1859, as On the Origin of Species was going to press, New Yorkers flooded the first studio building for artists to see The Heart of the Andes — a single painting exhibited by itself in an unknown young artist’s studio.
Alexander von Humboldt’s account of his time Latin America, which had sent Darwin on his epochal voyage, had sent Frederic Edwin Church (May 4, 1826–April 7, 1900) in Humboldt’s footsteps and returned him enraptured, transformed, restless to render the experience palpable, to transport others who would never have a chance to contact such ravishing wildness — a place of “perpetual spring,” as Humboldt had written in Cosmos, where “the depths of the earth and the vaults of heaven display all the richness of their forms and the variety of their phenomena,” where the laws of nature “stand indelibly described on the rocky walls and abrupt declivities of the Cordilleras.”
Quiet and introverted, prone to melancholy, Church had always been drawn to the wild wonders of nature, saved and set free by them. An earlier painting of Niagara Falls had prompted a London paper to declare that “art wasn’t limited to Europe” and that “it was not necessary for genius to study in any school but that of nature.” His cloudscapes surpassed even those of his Norwegian contemporary Knud Baade.
But The Heart of the Andes was something else entirely.
On the immense canvas, occupying nearly the entire wall of his studio, the thirty-two-year-old artist had painted not what he had seen in the Andes but what he had felt — the “unparalleled magnificence” of this lush land, he gasped in his diary, proclaiming it “one of the great wonders of Nature.” The setting was a real place just outside Quito, but Church had infused it with elements of other Andean landscapes that had impressed themselves upon his soul during two separate trips four years apart — a composite of the enchanted imagination he spent more than a year composing.
Peak by peak the mountain cascades toward the clouds until it merges with the sky as its foot melts into a waterfall. Details of exquisite aliveness punctuate the vista — a blue-blooming shrub, a pendulous bird’s nest, a resplendent quetzal perched on a branch, lichen on the bark of a broken tree, two people kneeling before a white wooden cross — all of it awash in light that only consciousness can see, impossible for a camera lens to capture.
Rebelling against the stale convention of gilded frames, Church had invented a new kind of frame made of walnut wood, onto which he draped curtains to give the illusion of a window opening when the painting was being revealed. Silver reflectors focused gas lights onto the canvas to emulate the sunlit atmosphere of the landscape itself. The effect, The New York Times wrote, was “simply magical” — “a new sensation in art, giving a reality of atmospheric space to the picture, and a delicacy to the tones of the coloring, which must be seen to be at all appreciated or understood.” Before the days of easy travel, before color photography, most of the visitors had never seen and would never see with their own eyes nature so wild, mountains so majestic. Here was virtual reality — an immersion in light, color, and feeling that speaks not just to the eye but to the entire system of being we call soul.
For three weeks, people packed into Church’s studio, sometimes more than two thousand per day, gasping each time the curtain was drawn open, shuddering with the vertigo of the sublime. On the closing day, the line for admission curled around the block, around the clock. An influential art collector who would help found the Metropolitan Museum of Art a decade later ended up purchasing the painting for $10,000 — more than anyone had ever paid for a work by an American artist.
The Heart of the Andes was also an emblem of the cruelties of chance and the mercies of chance. Just after the exhibition opened, Church received devastating news of his hero — 89 and weakened by a stroke, Alexander von Humboldt had greeted death the way he had lived life: “How glorious these sunbeams are!” were his last words, “They seem to call Earth to the Heavens!”
He could have been describing Church’s painting; he could have been describing that incandescent cosmos of connection two people enter when they fall in love — the cosmos Church what thrust into without warning when he encountered among the thousands of spectators the woman who would become the love of his life. Within a year, he had married Isabel at the picturesque Hudson Valley mansion he bought with his earnings from The Heart of the Andes.
At forty-four, on the insistence of Central Park creator Frederick Law Olmsted, Church became Park Commissioner of New York — the closest thing to a guardian angel of the urban wilderness. He would devote the rest of his life capturing nature’s wildness and wonder in transportive paintings of rainbows and volcanos, waterfalls and icebergs, numberless cloud studies and sunsets, moonrise and the aurora borealis, all of them rendered with that rare combination of passion and precision that makes anything — a painting, a poem, a person — great.
And much of it he shared with Isabel, who sat with him sunset after sunset over the Hudson Valley, pressed ferns into an herbarium alongside him while he painted in Jamaica — a living reminder that there is no greater form of love than looking together in the direction of wonder.
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.
2025-09-13 08:45:15
On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed several cylindrical pits on the Moon with just the right shape to be shaded just the right amount to offer shelter from the extremes of the lunar surface. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to act as its thermostat, its temperature fluctuates dramatically as it faces and turns away from the Sun, rising to 260°F (about 127°C) in the daytime and plummeting to -280°F (about -173°C) at night. But these unique nooks, which are most likely collapsed lava tubes, are a cozy 63°F (17°C) inside — he feeling-tone of a crisp autumn day in Brooklyn, where I live. Images from the LRO suggested that these pits might unfold into caves that would make perfect sites for lunar exploration — campsites with a stable temperature, more protected from cosmic rays, solar radiation, and micrometeorites.
There is something poetic in knowing that we evolved in caves and might one day inhabit caves on another celestial body, having invented the means to get there with the imagination that bloomed over millions of years in the lonely bone cave of the mind.
There is also something poetic in knowing that as we fantasize about leaving for the Moon, the Moon is leaving us.
The prolific English astronomer Edmund Halley first began suspecting this disquieting fact in the early 18th century after analyzing ancient eclipse records. Nobody believed him — the Moon looked so steady, so unlosable. It took a quarter millennium for his theory to be vindicated: When Apollo astronauts placed mirrors on the lunar surface and when laser beams were beamed a them from Earth, it was revealed that the Moon is indeed drifting away from us, at the precise rate of 3.8 centimeters per year — more than half the rate at which a child grows.
The Moon is leaving us because of the gravitational conversation between it and the Earth: the ocean tides. The drag they cause slows down the planet’s spin rate. Because gravity binds the Moon and the Earth, as the Earth loses angular momentum, the Moon overcompensates in response; as it speeds up, it begins slipping out of our gravitational grip, slowly moving away from us.
We know this thanks to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity — the revelation that space is not flat, time is not absolute, and spacetime is a single fabric along the curvature of which everything, including light, moves.
I thought of Einstein, who at sixteen, lonely and introverted, began wondering about the nature of the universe by imagining himself chasing a beam of light through outer space; I thought of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, also lonely and also dedicated to the light, who at the same time was formulating his general theory of love as “two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.” And I thought about how love is simply the solitary light between people, neither partitioned nor merged but shared, to light up the sliver of spacetime we have each been allotted before returning our borrowed stardust to the universe.
Somehow it all felt like a children’s book that didn’t yet exist. So I wrote it, having always believed that every good children’s book is a work of philosophy in disguise, a field guide to the mystery we are a part of and the mystery we are — in the language of children, which is the language of curiosity and unselfconscious sincerity, such books speak the most timeless truths to the truest parts of us by asking the simplest, deepest questions to help us understanding the world and understanding ourselves so that we may be more fully alive.
By one of those wrinkles in time and chance that we call luck, shortly after I sent the manuscript to my friend Claudia at Enchanted Lion Books, I received a lovely note from a stranger named Sarah Jacoby in response to my essay about Margaret Wise Brown’s complicated love with Michael Strange. Sarah told me that she too had fallen under the spell of their singular love while illustrating a picture-book biography of Margaret. I ordered it and, enchanted by Sarah’s soulful watercolors and tender creatures, spontaneously invited her to illustrate my lunar story of loneliness and love on nothing more than an instinct of creative kinship. She must have felt it too because, felicitously, she said “yes.”
And so The Coziest Place on the Moon (public library) was born.
This is how it begins:
It was on a Tuesday in July that Re woke up feeling like the loneliest creature on Earth and decided to go live in the coziest place on the Moon.
At exactly 7:26 — a pretty number, a pretty hour — Re mounted a beam of light and sailed into space.
It took exactly 1.255 seconds, because light travels at the speed of dreams, to land exactly where Re wanted to land.
Across Sarah’s enchanted spacescapes, Re has a surprising encounter that takes the story to where it always wanted to go — a reckoning with how to bear our loneliness and what it really means to love.
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.