themarginalian.org
Every themarginalian.org story we have translated and published, newest first. · 69 stories
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Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy
Once, at the gym with a physicist friend, I was struck by how no one else in the room had any idea that while she was sweating on the treadm
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The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel
"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 batt
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Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die
The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Ed
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Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance: André Gregory’s Extraordinary Letter to Richard Avedon about the Nature of Creativity
Half a millennium into our recovery from the civilizational wound Descartes inflicted by severing the body and the mind, we are bleeding wit
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The Stoic Key to Living with Presence: Seneca on Time Spent vs. Saved vs. Wasted
"Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing... is
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The Coziest Place on the Moon: Or, How to Bear Your Loneliness
On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that compute
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On Losing a Parent
We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape
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Actuality vs. Possibility and How to Hear the Signal of Your Life
Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burni
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The Canon of Solitude: 200 Years of Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Fertile Aloneness
There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in soli
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The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on How to Grow Old and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart
"If you can fall in love again and again ... if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cyni
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How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking
We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for
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Virginia Woolf on Creativity
"Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern... the whole world is a work of art... there is no Shakespeare... no Beethoven... no God; we are
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On Children: Poignant Parenting Advice from Kahlil Gibran
"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself... You may give them your love but not yo
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J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life
In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden
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Thomas Bernhard on Walking, Thinking, and the Paradox of Self-Reflection
"There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person
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The Peace of Wild Things: Wendell Berry’s Poetic Antidote to Despair, Animated
On where to seek refuge from the forethought of grief.
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Seneca on True and False Friendship
"Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with
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The Moving Story of the Dawn Redwood: How a Fossil Came Back to Life to Bring Humanity Together in the Middle of Our Deadliest War
How an ancient survivor of the unsurvivable became a triumph of the human spirit in a divided world.
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The Fascinating Science of How We Think Not with the Brain But with the World
"By reaching beyond the brain... we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain id
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How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself
Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destin
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A Beginning, Not a Decline: Colette on the Splendor of Autumn and the Autumn of Life
In praise of "the gaiety of those who have nothing more to lose and so excel at giving."
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The Day Dostoyevsky Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Dream
"And it is so simple... You will instantly find how to live."
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Why Leaves Change Color and How We Become Who We Are: The Science of Chlorophyll and the Poetics of Personhood
"We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us."
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The Unspeakable World: Alan Watts on How to Touch the Pulse of Life
What makes life so disorienting is that its greatest revelations and greatest transformations are inarticulable. William James knew this whe
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