2025-04-02 10:09:47
“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his 1964 classic Games People Play. Four centuries earlier, Galileo had both combated and complicated the problem by inventing timekeeping and with it, in a deep sense, the modern world.
The first clocks were a revolution, a revelation, a civilizing force. The young saw them as a form of rebellion against their provincial, blinkered elders. One teenager wrote:
When mankind invented how to measure time, they invented a notion of prodigious utility for the commons; although time in itself is no matter, it is a fact that all living beings are nonetheless under its rule; we hold for simpleminded, even barbaric, such people as do not know how old they are; when we are in the country, without a watch, under a dull sky and unaware of the time of day so that the evening ensnares us unexpectedly, we find it insufferable.
That teenager was the fifteen-year-old son of the Swedish biologist and physician Carl Linnaeaus (May 23, 1707–10 January 10, 1778), writing his academic thesis on an improbable and inspired invention of his father’s: a flower clock to measure time in bloom.
Born into a world where the same plant was known by a different name in every language and in different regions of the same country, Linnaeus systematized and harmonized the lexicon of the living world with his binomial nomenclature, giving each organism a two-part name composed of Latin grammatical forms. Space had not yet been standardized — the invention of the meter was half a century away — and time was still a local phenomenon, even knowledge itself was a chaos of information in the pre-decimal library, but when the twenty-eight-year-old Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae in 1735, the living world was suddenly ordered and nature was reclaimed as the commons of humanity, an immense and elegant system of which Homo sapiens was just one part.
Although he had been an obsessive list-maker and cataloguer since childhood, Linnaeus considered time the most profound organizing principle of life — so much so that he would later liken his classification system to “placing the pendulum in the clock.”
In his mid-thirties, he was appointed Professor of Medicine at his alma mater, Uppsala University, where he had studied medicine and botany a decade earlier. His post tasked him with overseeing the university’s botanical garden, so he took up residence in a house at the south-eastern corner of the garden with his wife and their newborn son. Linnaeus would rise at before dawn to spend his day obsessively observing and recording the rhythms of plants well into the night. On weekends, he would take his students on Herbationes — nature rambles — to study local plants in their native habitat, noting the changes in them across the longer sweep of seasonal time.
Immersed in the lives of plants around the clock and across the year, Linnaeaus grew fascinated by the variation in different species’ relationship to time. Just as (we now know) different humans have different chronotypes, which shape when we are most creative and alert, he discovered that different flowers open and close at different parts of the day and night, not at random but following a strict pattern. Nothing was known then of circadian rhythms or of phytochrome and cryptochrome — the photoreceptor proteins that make this photoperiodism possible. Linnaeaus seemed to have found nature’s own clock partway between mystery and mathematics — a glimpse of some deep truth in the mirror of beauty.
After incubating his insight for a decade, Linnaeus presented it under the heading Horologium Florae — “floral clock” — in his 1751 book Philosophia Botanica, listing 46 species of flowering plants whose blossoms open and close at particular times of the day and night: from the dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) opening at 4AM and the Alpine poppy (Lieracium helvetica) at 6AM to the common marigold (Calendula officinalis) closing at 3PM and the day-lily (Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus) at 10PM.
Over the next century, botanical gardens and lay gardeners around the world began trying to plant living clocks. In Victorian England, the popular ornamental flowering plant Mirabilis jalapa became known as “four o’clock flower.” The eminent French entomologist Félix Édouard Guérin-Méneville devoted a section of his 1836 Pictorial Dictionary of Natural History and Natural Phenomena to this “ingenious idea” of “the illustrious legislator of modern botany,” which inspired him to consider “the very curious subject” of “plant sleep” — a question epochs ahead of the new science of plant intelligence.
At its heart, Linnaeaus’s flower clock was part celebration of human ingenuity in the triumph of timekeeping, part prayerful protest against the mechanization of time that was already auguring the age of industry and our self-expatriation from the rest of nature. Like The Golden Record, it was a poetic gesture rather than a scientific one — a mirror held up to humanity to help us remember who we are: creatures made of time and moved by beauty, governed by the same laws that order particle and pistil, that tune a flower to its star and harmonize the stars into a universe, “the Amen beyond the prayer.”
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.
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2025-03-29 22:05:42
At the bottom of the abyss between us is the hard fact that to be a person, a particular person, is so profoundly different from what any other person can suppose. This is why one of the hardest learnings in life is that you cannot love — or scold, or coax, or palter — anyone out of their personal suffering or into their personal potential, cannot shepherd anyone else’s becoming. We may live our lives in parallel, but at the most fundamental level we experience aliveness alone, in the solitary chamber of the self, our experience a Möbius strip of consciousness folded unto itself, our becoming the most private, most significant work we have.
Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) made public art of this private work, his poetry so eternal and universal precisely because it came from a place so personal. Animated at once by a profound existential loneliness and a deep feeling of connection to every atom, every person, and every blade of grass, he spent his life writing and rewriting Leaves of Grass — the record of his becoming — always addressing the person in the reader, always owning the person in himself.
While on the other side of the Atlantic Nietzsche was admonishing that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Whitman was reckoning with the rapids of responsibility for your life. He writes in one of the poems:
No one can acquire for another — not one,
Not one can grow for another — not one.
The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him,
The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him,
The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him,
The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him,
The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him,
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him — it cannot fail.
Echoing Hermann Hesse’s insistence that “no prophet or teacher can relieve you of the need to look within,” Whitman urges us to heed the singular call of our own becoming bellowing beneath the din of the world:
Underneath the lessons of things, spirits, Nature, governments,
ownerships, I swear I perceive other lessons,
Underneath all to me is myself, to you yourself.
He distills this first and final truth of life in the closing stanzas of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” — one of the greatest poems ever written, and one of the most perspectival takes on time. Insisting that you must abide “no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself,” he observes that at the end of life, we all invariably face…
…the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.
A generation later, another of the world’s most original poets would come to compose the best manifesto I know for the courage to be yourself.
Complement with Virginia Woolf on how to hear your soul and Marion Milner’s superb field guide to self-possession inspired by Woolf, then revisit Whitman on what makes a great person and how to keep criticism from sinking your soul.
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.
2025-03-27 22:26:04
The necessities of survival make our lives livable, but everything that makes them worth living partakes of the art of the unnecessary: beauty (the cave was no warmer or safer for our paintings, and what about the bowerbird?), love (how easily we could propagate our genes without it), music (we may have never milked it from mathematics, and the universe would have cohered just the same).
Play is one of those things. We might make do without it, but we wouldn’t create — it is no accident that Einstein attributed his best ideas to his practice of “combinatory play,” that Baudelaire turned to the season of play in his definition of genius as “nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.”
Because pure play liberates us from any notion of winning or losing and therefore liberates us from “the prisons we choose to live inside,” those in power have always tried to undermine the value of play. Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, derided play as an irrational and therefore unnecessary activity in which “the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose.”
What you lose, of course, is yourself — that is the fundamental experience of flow characteristic of all true play and all creative work — and in so unselfing, you find the moment, you find the universe, you find wonder.
In the spring of 1933, partway in time between Bentham and Ackerman, the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga (December 7, 1872–February 1, 1945) took the podium at Leyden University to deliver his annual address as a rector. It startled all in attendance with its central insight nothing less than countercultural in a world still recovering from its first great war and already hurtling toward another: that “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.”
This would become the backbone of Huizinga’s visionary 1938 book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (public library). Animated by questions “hovering over spheres of thought barely accessible either to psychology or to philosophy,” it went on to inspire everything from board games to mobile architecture to the magic circle concept of virtual worlds, and to influence generations of thinkers as sundry as Eric Berne (who cited Huizinga in his revolutionary 1964 book Games People Play), Richard Powers (who built the cathedral of his excellent novel Playground upon Huizinga’s foundation), and Thomas Merton (who underlined passages on nearly every page of his copy).
While his Austrian contemporary Otto Rank was pleading for “the recognition and the acceptance of the irrational element as the most vital part of human life,” Huizinga considers play — “a well-defined quality of action which is different from ‘ordinary’ life” — as evidence that our lives are animated by something beyond mind and beyond matter:
The incidence of play is not associated with any particular stage of civilization or view of the universe. Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter. Even in the animal world it bursts the bounds of the physically existent. From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous. Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos. The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation. Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.
This may be why evolutionary theory — which is an explanatory framework based on reason: adaptation as cause and effect — has so far failed to explain why nature gave us play, as unnecessary and as hallowing as any act of grace:
In this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening, lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play. Nature, so our reasoning mind tells us, could just as easily have given her children all those useful functions of discharging superabundant energy, of relaxing after exertion, of training for the demands of life, of compensating for unfulfilled longings, etc., in the form of purely mechanical exercises and reactions. But no, she gave us play, with its tension, its mirth, and its fun.
[…]
Play presents itself to us… as an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily lives. As a regularly recurring relaxation, however, it becomes the accompaniment, the complement, in fact an integral part of life in general. It adorns life, amplifies it and is to that extent a necessity both for the individual — as a life function — and for society by reason of the meaning it contains, its significance, its expressive value, its spiritual and social associations, in short, as a culture function.
Play is so compelling in part because it “lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly,” free from the binaries of right and wrong that bind our ordinary lives. This is Huizinga’s most daring axiom: While the traditional view holds that moral development — the annealing of our rights and wrongs — is how societies advance, he argues that play is the true sculptor of civilization:
Real civilization cannot exist in the absence of a certain play-element, for civilization presupposes limitation and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely accepted. Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules, and true civilization will always demand fair play. Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms. Hence the cheat or the spoil-sport shatters civilization itself. To be a sound culture-creating force this play-element must be pure. It must not consist in the darkening or debasing of standards set up by reason, faith or humanity. It must not be a false seeming, a masking of political purposes behind the illusion of genuine play-forms. True play knows no propaganda; its aim is in itself, and its familiar spirit is happy inspiration.
And yet for all this theorizing, Huizinga concedes that the role and riddle of play is a “question that eludes and deludes us to the end, in a lasting silence.” Nearly a century after him, Diane Ackerman turned that silence into song with her lyrical defense of “deep play” as that vital “combination of clarity, wild enthusiasm, saturation in the moment, and wonder” that makes life more alive.
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.
2025-03-26 00:16:28
“We are bathing in mystery and confusion,” Carl Sagan told his best interviewer. “That will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”
We have wielded our tools of reason at the mystery — theorems and telescopes, postulates and particle colliders — but the best tool we have invented for cutting through our confusion remains an instrument of love and not of reason: We make art.
Long before we understood how stars made souls and what happens when we return our borrowed stardust to the universe, our ancestors sought an organizing principle for the mystery, drawing celestial maps and creating elaborate cosmogonies with no knowledge of gravity and orbits, of galaxies and exoplanets. Our arts anticipated our equations and counterbalance them — science has only deepened our confusion with discoveries intimating that this entire universe might exist inside a black hole, that it might not be the only universe, that the thingness of everything in it may just be a hologram. It would, of course, be thrilling to confirm any of these theories. But for all the thrill of truth, it is at the intersection of mystery and meaning that we become most fully human and find the things that make us most alive: wonder, beauty, love.
This may be why I find myself so enraptured by the work of Tasmanian-born Australian artist Shane Drinkwater, which I came upon in Elements: Chaos, Order and the Five Elemental Forces (public library) — Stephen Ellcock’s rigorously researched and passionately constellated cosmos of wonder.
Partway between ancient Tibetan astrological thangka, Maria Clara Eimmart’s 17th-century astronomical paintings, and Ella Harding Baker’s 19th-century solar system quilt, bearing echoes of Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, Drinkwater’s paintings and collages are coded cosmogonies of color, form, and feeling — orbits and planets, comets and meteor showers, dashed and dotted and arrowed, simple yet mysterious, elemental yet deeply human.
Emanating from them is the same transcendent bewilderment that prompted pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell to sigh in her diary:
We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.
Couple with Native artist Magaret Nazon’s stunning celestial beadwork, then revisit Thomas Wright’s self-published and scrumptiously illustrated 1750 marvel An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe.
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.
2025-03-21 23:30:38
When I can’t sleep, I read children’s books. One night, I discovered In the Half Room (public library) by Carson Ellis in my tsundoku — an impressionistic invitation into a world where only half of everything exists.
Leafing through this quietly delightful treasure, I had a flash memory of a passage from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (public library) — the 1985 classic in which Oliver Sacks staggered the modern mind with revelations of how the brain’s fragility renders reality itself fragile.
One of the cases he relays is that of a bright woman in her sixties called Mrs. S., whose right hemisphere was savaged by a massive stroke. Although it left her with “perfectly preserved intelligence — and humor,” it also left her living in only half the world:
She sometimes complains to the nurses that they have not put dessert or coffee on her tray. When they say, “But, Mrs. S., it is right there, on the left,” she seems not to understand what they say, and does not look to the left. If her head is gently turned, so that the dessert comes into sight, in the preserved right half of her visual field, she says, “Oh, there is it — it wasn’t there before.” She has totally lost the idea of “left,” with regard to both the world and her own body. Sometimes she complains that her portions are too small, but this is because she only eats from the right half of the plate — it does not occur to her that it has a left half as well. Sometimes, she will put on lipstick, and make up the right half of her face, leaving the left half completely neglected: it is almost impossible to treat these things, because her attention cannot be drawn to them and she has no conception that they are wrong. She knows it intellectually, and can understand, and laugh; but it is impossible for her to know it directly.
Termed hemi-inattention in the 1950s when it was first clinically described, this condition is now better known as hemispheric neglect or unilateral neglect. A year after The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was published, the physician M. Marsel Mesulam captured its startling semireality in his book Principles of Behavioral Neurology:
When the neglect is severe, the patient may behave almost as if one half of the universe had abruptly ceased to exist in any meaningful form… Patients with unilateral neglect behave not only as if nothing were actually happening in the left hemispace, but also as if nothing of any importance could be expected to occur there.
What makes neurological disorders so fascinating is that their abnormal physiology is often a microcosm of the psychological pitfalls of the healthy brain. Who hasn’t shuddered with a flash of aphasia, suddenly unable to retrieve the right word or formulate a thought into a coherent sentence when in shock or in awe or tired to the bone? Hemispheric neglect menaces our sense of reality with the intimation that we too may be missing entire regions of reality because our attention simply cannot be drawn to them.
Perhaps we too are living in the half room.
And how can it be otherwise, given we are creatures of emotional incompleteness capable of extraordinary willful blindness, going through our days half-aware of our own interior, the other half relegated to an unconscious which our dreams, if we remember them, and our therapy, if it is any good, hint at but which remains largely subterranean. How, then, can we expect to have a complete picture of anything or anyone else?
There is no half room more extreme than infatuation. In those delirious early stages of falling in love, we magnify the positive qualities of the beloved to a point of crystalline perfection, turning a willfully blind eye to their shortcomings, only to watch the shiny crystals slowly melt to reveal the rugged reality of the actual person — imperfect and half-available, for they too are half-opaque to themselves.
To come to love someone after being in love with them is to be willing to walk the full room from corner to corner across every diagonal, to run your fingers over the floorboards and love every splinter, to run your gaze over the ceiling and love every crack — not because you love the pain and the leakage, but because you love the totality of the person, that incalculable sum we call a soul.
Mrs. S., intelligent and determined, refused to let her condition shape her experience of reality and developed a simple, brilliant compensatory strategy: Each time she knew something was there but she could not find it, unable to look left and therefore to turn left, she would turn right and rotate 180 degrees until it came into view. Suddenly, the hospital food portions she felt were too small doubled to their full size and she felt sated.
The trick, of course, is to be intelligent enough and humble enough to recognize that you might be missing half of reality.
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.
2025-03-19 09:03:47
John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom window. He looked to see his father dead by his own gun. Within months, his mother had remarried, changing her last name and that of her son, who became John Berryman (October 25, 1914–January 7, 1972). He would spend the rest of his life trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art being the best instrument we have invented for our suffering, he would become a poet. “I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong & so undone,” he would write about his father in a poem, not realizing he was writing about himself.
Berryman tried to medicate his deepening depression with alcohol and religion, but writing remained his most effective salve. He wrote like the rest of us draw breath — lungfuls of language and feeling to keep himself alive: ten poetry collections, numerous essays, thousands of letters, and a long biography of his favorite writer.
Early one morning in the pit of his fifty-eighth winter — having won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a $10,000 grant from the newly founded National Endowment for the Arts, having dined with the President at the White House, having nurtured the dreams of a generation of poets as a teacher and mentor and unabashed lavisher with praise, and having finally quit drinking — John Berryman jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis to his death, slain by the meaning confluence of biochemistry and trauma that can leave even the strongest of minds “so undone.”
Several months earlier, Berryman had written a long letter to his former teacher Mark Van Doren, who had emboldened him to make a life in poetry and who would lovingly remember him as “an overflowing man, a man who was never self-contained, a man who would have been multitudes had there been time and world enough for such a miracle.” Despite reporting a routine of astonishing vitality — studying theology before breakfast, keeping up “a fancy exercise-programme” in the afternoon, reading a canon of medical lectures as research for a novel he was writing, responding to a dozen letters a day, and “and supporting with vivacity & plus-strokes & money various people, various causes” — Berryman placed at the center of the letter a self-flagellating lament about his “lifelong failure to finish anything,” which he attributed to his twenty four years of alcoholism. (This may be the grimmest symptom of depression — a punitive hyperfocus on one’s perceived deficiencies, to the total erasure of one’s talents and triumphs.)
A generation after neuroscience founding father enumerated the six “diseases of the will” that keep the gifted from living up to their gifts and Kafka considered the four psychological hindrances of the talented, Berryman reflects on what he believed kept him from achieving all he wanted to achieve, distilling the three “capital vices” of creative work:
1. some bone-laziness but mostly DOLDRUMS, proto-despair, great-poets-die-young or at least unfulfilled like Coleridge & Co., all that crap.
2. the opposite, fantastic hysterical labor, accumulation, proliferation…
3. over-ambitiousness. Part of this is temperamental grandiosity but more of it — unless of course I am wrong — is legitimate self-demand on the largest conceivable scale.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who went on to become one of the most celebrated and influential poets of the nineteenth century not because of but despite the uncommon share of suffering she was dealt, had an antidote to the first.
Seamus Heaney, whose poetry won him the Nobel Prize, had an antidote to the second.
As we often give others the advice we most need ourselves, Berryman himself offered an antidote to the third — which he considered his “greatest problem” — in his answer to a student’s question. That student would go on to become a great poet himself, immortalizing his mentor’s advice in a poem that remains the finest blueprint I know to staying sane as an artist:
BERRYMAN
by W.S. MerwinI will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world wardon’t lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you’re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanityjust one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twicehe suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literallyit was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloophe was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in Englandas for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetryhe said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and inventionI had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’tyou can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write
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.