2026-09-19 21:40:27
The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get to know the land he was being asked to die for. He hitchhiked and hopped freight trains, rode in ramshackle busses and walked sweltering miles across the American Southwest. Upon returning home to Pennsylvania, he was promptly drafted and spent two reluctant years as a military police officer in occupied Italy. Defiant of authority and opposed to the war, he was demoted twice and finally honorably discharged “by reason of demobilization of men.” When he received the discharge papers, he wrote “RETURN TO SENDER” on the envelope in big bold letters to signal that he was never willing for the job he was being fired from. The FBI took note and opened a file, to which they would later add the World Peace Movement he organized on his college campus, his acts of civil disobedience to protect old-growth forests from the corporate chainsaw, and his attendance of a Conference in Defense of Children in Vienna, deemed “communist initiated.”
Even as a teenager, Abbey understood that ideologies are only ever defeated not with guns but with ideas, so he decided to subvert the system by enrolling to study philosophy and literature at the University of New Mexico under the G.I. Bill. He spent the rest of his twenties traveling (he fell especially in love with Scotland), thinking about what makes life worth living, and dreaming of becoming a writer. It was when he took a job as a park ranger at thirty that he found the material for his first book: the ravishing Desert Solitaire, which went on to inspire generations of writers and environmental activists, among them Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Cheryl Strayed, and Rebecca Solnit.
Throughout his life, Abbey kept a journal that stands as a crowning curio in the canon of notable diaries, selections from which were posthumously published as Confessions of a Barbarian (public library). In an entry penned just before his twenty-fifth birthday, when most of us move through the world feeling invincible and immortal, Abbey contemplates the end of life:
HOW TO DIE — but first, how not to:
Not in a smelly old bloody-gutted bed in a rest-home room drowning in the damp wash from related souls groping around you in an ocean heavy with morbid fascination with agony, sin and guilt, expiated, with clinical faces and automatic tear glands functioning perfunctorily and a fat priest on the naked heart.
Not in snowy whiteness under arc lights and klieg lights and direct television hookup. No never under clinical smells and sterilized medical eyes cool with detail calculated needle-prolonged agonizing, stiff and starchy in the white monastic cell, no.
Not in the muddymire of battle blood commingled with charnel-flesh and others’ blood, guts, bones, mud and excrement in the damp smell of blasted and wrung-out air; nor in the mass-packed weight of the cities atomized while masonry topples and chandeliers crash clashing buried with a million others, no.
Not the legal murder either — too grim and ugly such a martyrdom — down long aisled with chattering Christers chins on shoulders under bright lights again a spectacle an entertainment grim sticky-quiet officialdom and heavy-booted policemen guiding the turning of a pubic hair gently grinding in a knucklebone an arm hard and obscene fatassed policemen everywhere under the judicial — not to be murdered so, no never.
But how to:
Alone, elegantly, a wolf on a rock, old pale and dry, dry bones rattling in the leather bag, eyes alight, high, dry, cool, far off, dim distance alone, free as a dying wolf on a pale dry rock gurgling quietly alone between the agony-spasms of beauty and delight; when the first flash of hatred comes to crawl, ease off casually forward into space the old useless body, falling, turning, glimpsing for one more time the blue evening sky and the far distant lonesome rocks below — before the crash, before…
With none to say no, none.
Way off yonder in the evening blue, in the gloaming.
When he did die a lifetime later in his desert home, Abbey left a winking note for anyone seeking his final words: “No Comment.” He requested that his useless body be used “to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree.” Wishing to have no part in the funeral industry’s embalmments and coffins, he asked his friends to ignore the state laws, place him in his favorite blue sleeping bag, and bury him right into the thirsty ground. If a wake was to be held, he wanted it simple, brief, and cheerful, with bagpipe music, “lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking,” and no formal speeches — “though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge.” When the wake was held at Saguaro National Park, where he had found his voice as a writer, Wendell Berry and Terry Tempest Williams were among those who felt the urge.
Long after he composed his passionate prospectus for how (not) to die and not long before he returned his borrowed atoms to the earth, Abbey offered his best advice on how to live in a speech he delivered before a gathering of environmental activists:
It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.
So… ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.
Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.
Couple with Anna Belle Kaufman’s spare and stunning poem about how to live and how to die, then revisit the poetic science of what actually happens when we die.
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.
2026-09-18 23:35:08
Half a millennium into our recovery from the civilizational wound Descartes inflicted by severing the body and the mind, we are bleeding with a Cartesian cleft of our own making — the damaging divide between life and work. The notion of a “workaholic,” often worn as a badge on the lapel of the modern ego, presupposes someone who makes work the central axis of life at the expense of living. The very question of “work/life balance,” inherited from the industrial model of labor, asks us to live in parts — a portion of the person doing the working, another doing the living. But culture is not made the way cars are made. We create — anything that is not mechanical, that is not a commodity, that touches anyone else in a meaningful way — with everything we are: every experience we have ever had, every book we have ever read and every place we have ever walked, every elation and every shattering. The simplest poem pouring from the poet’s pen, the smallest wooden spoon taking shape in the carpenter’s hand, is the work of a lifetime.
On the cusp of turning seventy, as his lifelong friend Richard Avedon was dying, legendary theater director André Gregory took up drawing to his own surprise and found himself returned “to some very early state, a time before loneliness, abandonment, and fear” — that lovely feeling of breaking the template of oneself, leaving the comfort zone of competency on which reputations are built, and venturing into the vivifying firstness of something new. Such seemingly unproductive pastimes, Gregory realized, feed the life that is the raw material for the work, though we never know what will sprout from each lived seed.
Shortly after Avedon’s death, Gregory wrote to his friend the letter he “always intended to write but never did,” addressing their divergent views on life and work — the “one deep source of disagreement and friction” in their profound friendship. (Everyone who has lost a loved one knows that the conversations continue, knows what Hemingway knew: that “no one you love is ever dead.”)
In what might be the mightiest defense of the creative spirit since William Blake’s, Gregory writes:
Let’s face it — artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are. They are like plants growing in winter. You can’t see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.
In a passage evocative of Kurt Vonnegut’s magnificent poem-parable about the Shelter Island billionaire and the measure of enough, Gregory holds up a mirror to his departed friend — one from which every living person who wouldn’t know who they are without what to do averts their eyes:
You owned that exquisite house in Montauk, one of the loveliest I have seen anywhere, on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. You designed it yourself. But you almost never went there. Did you yearn for another kind of life? Yes, you had friends—almost all driven and workaholic artists—but never a community. You saw each of us alone. In those lovely rooms of yours, over superb dinners, the talk would always be of work, work, and work.
Each time you stopped, you would descend into a depression, believing that you had hit a wall and lost the ability to work, that you would never work again.
The contrast Gregory paints is a miniature manifesto for the fundamental indivisibility of the self and the combinatorial nature of creativity:
You chose work. I have chosen the life. The work and the life.
At least I have done so in the last 30 years. Doesn’t the work on the self inform the Work? When we inch closer to ourselves, to who we originally were, who we’re meant to be, doesn’t that serve the work, doesn’t it connect us more deeply to others? Isn’t there value in spreading laughter, love, and compassion to the people around us? … The work changes the life, and the life changes the work.
Couple with Benedictine monk and philosopher David Steindl-Rast on the relationship between play and purposeful work, then revisit Lewis Hyde’s classic meditation on work vs. labor and how to sustain the creative spirit.
HT Letters Live
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.
2026-09-18 23:23:43
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her abiding insistence on choosing presence over productivity. But how do we really spend our days? In our era, the average human lifetime will contain two years of boredom, six months of watching commercials, 67 days of heartbreak, and 14 minutes of pure joy.
This devastating arithmetic of time wasted versus time meaningfully spent may seem like a modern problem, but while the nature of our cultural technologies has undeniably exacerbated the ratio, the equation itself stretches all the way to antiquity, with only the variables altered. (Lest we forget, books were derided as a dangerous distraction in 12th-century Japan.)
That equation, and how to balance it more favorably toward a life of substance and presence rather than one of waste and want, is what the great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examined at the end of his life in Letters from a Stoic (public library) — a collection of 124 letters he composed to his friend Lucilius, which also gave us Seneca on true and false friendship, overcoming fear, and the antidote to anxiety.
Fittingly, the first letter addresses the most urgent subject haunting human life: time, and more particularly, the existential calculus of how we spend or waste the sliver of time allotted us along the continuum of being. Fifteen years after he composed his timeless treatise on filling the shortness of life with wide living, Seneca, now in his final years, counsels his friend:
Set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands… Certain moments are torn from us… some are gently removed… others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness.
The most perilous carelessness, Seneca argues eighteen centuries before Kierkegaard bemoaned the absurdity of busyness and Walt Whitman contemplated what makes life worth living, is that of sliding through life in a trance of expectancy, always vacating the present moment in order to lurch toward the next — a kind of living death. He writes:
What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death’s hands.
Therefore… hold every hour in your grasp. 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 ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, — time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.
Reflecting on how he himself practices what he is preaching, Seneca writes with Stoic self-awareness:
I confess frankly: my expense account balances, as you would expect from one who is free-handed but careful. I cannot boast that I waste nothing, but I can at least tell you what I am wasting, and the cause and manner of the loss; I can give you the reasons why I am a poor man… I do not regard a man as poor, if the little which remains is enough for him. I advise you, however, to keep what is really yours; and you cannot begin too early. For, as our ancestors believed, it is too late to spare when you reach the dregs of the cask. Of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight, and the quality is vile.
Complement this particular fragment of the timelessly rewarding Letters from a Stoic with Ursula K. Le Guin’s gorgeous ode to time, Bertrand Russell on the relationship between leisure and social justice, Margaret Mead on leisure and creativity, and Emerson on how to live with presence in a culture of busyness, then revisit Seneca on what it means to be a generous human being and his Stoic key to peace of mind.
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.
2026-09-18 10:54:15
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 — the 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 at 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.
2026-09-18 06:47:20
We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape to test our breaking point. We can lose people to life — to conflict, to confusion, to the consequences of their trauma — losses painful precisely because it could be otherwise. We can lose people to death — losses painful because it can’t and never again will be otherwise.
Of all our possible losses, the loss of a parent is the least evitable and the most complicated, for it is the most primal, most charged with the complexities of attachment and individuation, the complexities that shaped how we move through the world, how we suffer, how we love.
But while Hemingway was right that “no one you love is ever dead,” something very real does die when a parent does — a biological tether, a memory storehouse, a fantasy of what the relationship could have been. And even if you know what to do when your parents are dying, even if you do do it with the utmost grace, nothing can brace you for the impact of that loss when it does come.
Still, there are ways you can move through it — things to hold in awareness, subtle kindnesses, small graces with the grief process — that can salve the pain.
One comes from Joan Didion in a fragment from her classic The Year of Magical Thinking (public library):
After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Maryknoll priest, who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”
Another, soulful and imaginative, comes from a team of young animators from French animation academy Gobelins:
Couple with Didion on the art of letting go, then revisit the most important thing to remember about your mother.
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.
2026-09-18 00:38:16
Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billion dead stars whose signal light is only now reaching us, I found myself trembling with the parallel to life itself: The great paradox is that we are aflame with aliveness only as we burn through the atmosphere of now, and yet our lives are the story we constellate from the signals of bygone experience across the sky of time.
To be truly alive is to inhabit the moment not as a future memory of experience, not as a projection of the past, but as a meteor of actuality.
That is what art historian George Kubler (July 26, 1912–October 3, 1996) explores in a fragment of his wholly revelatory 1962 book The Shape of Time (public library).
Observing that “time, like mind, is not knowable as such,” that “we know time only indirectly by what happens in it: by observing change and permanence; by marking the succession of events among stable settings; and by noting the contrast of varying rates of change,” he writes:
Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events.
Yet the instant of actuality is all we ever can know directly. The rest of time emerges only in signals relayed to us at this instant by innumerable stages and by unexpected bearers. These signals are like kinetic energy stored until the moment of notice when the mass descends along some portion of its path to the center of the gravitational system… These old signals are not actual. The nature of a signal is that its message is neither here nor now, but there and then. If it is a signal it is a past action, no longer embraced by the “now” of present being. The perception of a signal happens “now,” but its impulse and its transmission happened “then.” In any event, the present instant is the plane upon which the signals of all being are projected. No other plane of duration gathers us up universally into the same instant of becoming.
We can only ever know actuality through the creaturely sensorium in the cocoon of consciousness suspended from the dying twig of the living moment, and yet part of the price of consciousness is that, in blessing us with the capacity for prospection and retorspection, it has cursed us with the compulsion to evict ourselves from the moment. Kubler writes:
To other animals who live more by instinct than do humans, the instant of actuality must seem far less brief. The rule of instinct is automatic, offering fewer choices than intelligence, with circuits that close and open unselectively. In this duration choice is so rarely present that the trajectory from past to future describes a straight line rather than the infinitely bifurcating system of human experience. The ruminant or the insect must live time more as an extended present which endures as long as the individual life, while for us, the single life contains an infinity of present instants, each with its innumerable open choices in volition and in action… The moment of actuality slips too fast by the slow, coarse net of our senses. The galaxy whose light I see now may have ceased to exist millennia ago, and by the same token men cannot fully sense any event until after it has happened, until it is history, until it is the dust and ash of that cosmic storm which we call the present, and which perpetually rages throughout creation.
Paradoxically, the key to actuality is not maximizing but minimizing the possibilities of the moment:
The instant admits only one action while the rest of possibility lies unrealized. Actuality is the eye of the storm: it is a diamond with an infinitesimal perforation through which the ingots and billets of present possibility are drawn into past events. The emptiness of actuality can be estimated by the possibilities that fail to attain realization in any instant: only when they are few can actuality seem full.
The cruelty and the kindness of time is that the moment, while leaden with the baggage of the past and the burden of the future, is the only place where our lives take shape, where the shape can be reimagined and remade. And despite all of our advances in the science of now, it may be that art remains our best means of making the moment a laboratory of the possible. Kubler observes:
Most of the time the majority of people live by borrowed ideas and upon traditional accumulations, yet at every moment the fabric is being undone and a new one is woven to replace the old, while from time to time the whole pattern shakes and quivers, settling into new shapes and figures. These processes of change are all mysterious uncharted regions where the traveler soon loses direction and stumbles in darkness. The clues to guide us are very few indeed: perhaps the jottings and sketches of architects and artists, put down in the heat of imagining a form, or the manuscript brouillons of poets and musicians, crisscrossed with erasures and corrections, are the hazy coast lines of this dark continent of the “now,” where the impress of the future is received by the past.
Couple with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, then revisit Diane Seuss’s spare, splendid poem of instruction about how not to be a prisoner of the past.
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.