2026-02-25 09:00:20
“Compassion,” Karen Armstrong wrote in her stirring meditation on the true meaning of the Golden Rule, “asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.” But when our own hearts are gripped with the threat and terror of imminent pain, how can we step outside this fear-fraught circumstance and consider, with kindness and openhearted goodwill, the reality of another?
That’s what the wise and wonderful Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) captures in one of the many ennobling anecdotes in On the Move: A Life (public library) — his altogether magnificent memoir of love, lunacy, and a life fully lived.
He recounts an incident from the spring of 1963, in the heyday of motorcycling and weightlifting obsession, embedded in which is an allegory of the singular genius that would come to define his career and legacy — the delicate and demanding art of peering into another’s mind with empathetic curiosity and seeing the vulnerable humanity that animates it.
Dr. Sacks writes:
I was riding along Sunset Boulevard at a leisurely pace, enjoying the weather — it was a perfect spring day — and minding my own business. Seeing a car behind me in my driving mirror, I motioned the driver to overtake me. He accelerated, but when he was parallel with me, he suddenly veered towards me, making me swerve to avoid a collision. It didn’t occur to me that this was deliberate; I thought the driver was probably drunk or incompetent. Having overtaken me, the car then slowed down. I slowed, too, until he motioned me to pass him. As I did so, he swung into the middle of the road, and I avoided being sideswiped by the narrowest margin. This time there was no mistaking his intent.
I have never started a fight. I have never attacked anyone unless I have been attacked first. But this second, potentially murderous attack enraged me, and I resolved to retaliate. I kept a hundred yards or more behind the car, just out of his line of sight, but prepared to leap forward if he was forced to stop at a traffic light. This happened when we got to Westwood Boulevard. Noiselessly — my bike was virtually silent — I stole up on the driver’s side, intending to break a window or score the paintwork on his car as I drew level with him. But the window was open on the driver’s side, and seeing this, I thrust my fist through the open window, grabbed his nose, and twisted it with all my might; he let out a yell, and his face was all bloody when I let go. He was too shocked to do anything, and I rode on, feeling I had done no more than his attempt on my life had warranted.
Shortly after this heart-stopping encounter, Dr. Sacks found himself in a strikingly similar incident while driving to San Francisco on a desert road. An aggressive driver suddenly appeared onto the empty expanse and, moving at 90 mph, deliberately forced the motorcycle off the road. What happened next reveals Dr. Sacks as a sort of gentle giant, both deeply human in his capacity for fury and in possession of superhuman empathetic sensitivity:
By a sort of miracle, I managed to hold the bike upright, throwing up a huge cloud of dust, and regained the road. My attacker was now a couple of hundred yards ahead. Rage more than fear was my chief reaction, and I snatched a monopod from the luggage rack (I was very keen on landscape photography at the time and always traveled with camera, tripod, monopod, etc., lashed to the bike). I waved it round and round my head, like the mad colonel astride the bomb in the final scene of Dr. Strangelove. I must have looked crazy — and dangerous — for the car accelerated. I accelerated too, and pushing the engine as much as I could, I started to overtake it. The driver tried to throw me off by driving erratically, suddenly slowing, or switching from side to side of the empty road, and when that failed, he took a sudden side road in the small town of Coalinga — a mistake, because he got into a maze of smaller roads with me on his tail and finally got trapped in a cul-de-sac. I leapt off the bike (all 260 pounds of me) and rushed towards the trapped car, waving the monopod. Inside the car I saw two teenage couples, four terrified people, but when I saw their youth, their helplessness, their fear, my fist opened and the monopod fell out of my hand.
I shrugged my shoulders, picked up the monopod, walked back to the bike, and motioned them on. We had all, I think, had the fright of our lives, felt the nearness of death, in our foolish, potentially fatal duel.
On the Move, for reasons articulated here, remains one of the most moving books I’ve ever read. Complement this particular passage with Jane Goodall on empathy and Brené Brown on the crucial difference between empathy and sympathy, then revisit Oliver Sacks on storytelling and the curious psychology of writing, the paradoxical power of music, and this final farewell to the beloved science-storyteller.
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.
2026-02-25 06:59:17
In a lifetime of living in this body, I have known no more powerful a homecoming than music — nothing roots us more firmly into the house of being, nothing levitates us more buoyantly to that transcendent place beyond marrow and mind. Stripped of its nihilistic drama, there is an elemental cry of truth, for me at least, in Nietzsche’s pronouncement: “Without music life would be a mistake.” Even Edna St. Vincent Millay, for all her lyrical love of life, echoed the sentiment: “Without music I should wish to die. Even poetry, Sweet Patron Muse forgive me the words, is not what music is.”
Every writer unblinded by ego will concede this.
No writer has conceded it more beautifully or with more rapturous reverence for the life of the body in the life of music than Richard Powers in his exquisite 2003 novel The Time of Our Singing (public library).
One of the novel’s protagonists — a young black woman in 1930s Philadelphia — becomes an emissary of the power of music as an instrument of self-discovery and self-possession, a living testament to song as the pulse-beat of the soul:
Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.
Delia sang fearlessly. She threw back her head and nailed free-flying notes like a marksman nails skeet. She sang with such unfurling of self that the congregation couldn’t help but turn and look at the teenager, even when they should have been looking skyward.
[…]
Delia could feel them as she sang, the hearts of the flushed congregation flying up with her as she savored the song’s arc. She sheltered those souls in her sound and held them as motionless as the notes themselves, in that safe spot up next to grace. The audience breathed with her, beating to her measure. Her breath expanded sufficiently to take her across even the longest phrase. Her listeners were in her, and she in them, so long as the notes lasted.
When Delia marries a German-Jewish physicist who plays the piano and consider music “the language of time,” music takes on a richer meaning — or, rather, it is stripped down to its elemental raw material — for without the arrow of time, without being able to tell one moment from the next, there could be no melody and no rhythm. This is what makes music our supreme laboratory for feeling and time.
Eventually, the couple’s sons discover music on their own terms, in their own time. One of them — the novel’s first-person narrator — encounters its power and tenderness harmonized in a soul-stilling performance of ancient music by a choir at The Cloisters — the medieval monastery turned museum in the uppermost reaches of Manhattan, just past Harlem. The small boy, untainted with concepts, experiences music in its purest form, pouring out of the singers like daybreak, like something of another world, yet saturated with pure translucent presence, in that peculiar way transcendent experiences have of taking us both beyond and deeper into ourselves:
Silence falls, erasing all separateness. Then the silence gives way to its only answer. This is the first public concert I will remember ever hearing. Nothing I’ve already lived through prepares me for it. It runs through and rearranges me. I sit at the center of a globe of sound pointing me toward myself.
It doesn’t occur to me, at the age of seven, that a person might luck upon such a song only once a lifetime, if ever. I know how to tell sharp from flat, right singing from wrong. But I haven’t yet heard enough to tell ordinary beauty from once-only visits.
[…]
There is a sound like the burning sun. A sound like the surf of blood pumping through my ears. The women start by themselves, their note as spreading and dimensionless as my father says the present is. Keee, the letter-box slots of their mouths release — just the syllable of glee little Ruth made before we persuaded her to learn to talk. The sound of a simple creature, startling itself with praise before settling in for the night. They sing together, bound at the core for one last moment before everything breaks open and is born.
Then reee. The note splits into its own accompaniment. The taller woman seems to descend, just by holding her pitch while the smaller woman next to her rises. Rises a major third, that first interval any child any color anywhere learns to sing. Four lips curve upon the vowel, a pocket of air older than the author who set it there.
I know in my body what notes come next, even though I have nothing, yet, to call them. The high voice rises a perfect fifth, lifting off from the lower note’s bed. The lines move like my chest, soft cartilage, my ribs straying away from one another, on aaay, into a higher brightness, then collapsing back to fuse in unison.
I hear these two lines bending space as they speed away from each other, hurling outward, each standing still while the other moves. Long, short-short, long, long: They circle and return, like a blowing branch submitting again to its shadow. They near their starting pitch from opposite sides, the shared spot where they must impossibly meet back up. But just before they synchronize to see where they’ve been, just as they touch their lips to this recovered home, the men’s lines come from nowhere, pair off, and repeat the splitting game, a perfect fourth below.
More lines splinter, copy, and set off on their own. Aaay-laay Aaay-laay-eee! Six voices now, repeating and reworking, each peeling off on its own agenda, syncopated, staggered, yet each with an eye on the other, midair acrobats, not one of them wavering, no one crashing against the host of moving targets. This stripped-down simple singsong blooms like a firework peony. Everywhere in the awakened air, in a shower of staggered entrances, I hear the first phrase, keyed up, melted down, and rebuilt. Harmonies pile up, disintegrate, and reassemble elsewhere, each melody praising God in its own fashion, and everywhere combining to something that sounds to me like freedom.
Toward the end of the novel, decades and disillusionments later, Powers returns to music as the supreme instrument of our self-knowledge:
The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.
Complement with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe and violinist Natalie Hodges on the scientific poetics of sound and feeling, then revisit the remarkable story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
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.
2026-02-24 23:14:54
It could have been otherwise. That one defiant particle of matter could have never broken free from the equipoise of antimatter to sound the first note of something out of the mute nothingness, singing a universe into being. The universe could have withheld gravity, could have never compacted those first few atoms into a common center to bud the first star, could have never bloomed with billions of them. But here we are, circling a middling star in a modest solar system on a rocky planet replete with mountains and music, lichen and love, and on it the mirror the universe invented to contemplate itself: this shimmering consciousness.
It can be hard to bear, the weight of wonder, hard to hold all this bright improbability, hard to do laundry and email while reckoning with how the cosmos forged from the iron rib of dying stars creatures capable of the Benedictus and the atomic bomb.
Luckily, a species of mind has evolved to be the weight-bearer of wonder: the poet.
In the autumn of 2013, I was invited to the Library of Congress for a celebration of the newly acquired Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan papers. There alongside Sagan’s drafts of Pale Blue Dot, his hand-drawn diagrams of space and time, and his list of children’s book ideas (“Why do birds fly?” “Why do we cry?” “What is it like to be a tree?” “When I talk to myself, who’s listening?”) was a 1974 letter to his friend Timothy Leary, whom Sagan was about to visit in prison. After some thoughts on evolution, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the logistics of the upcoming visit, he added a postscript:
P.S. The enclosed poem, ‘The Other Night’ by Dianne Ackermann [sic] of Cornell, is something I think we both resonate to. It’s unfinished so it shouldn’t yet be quoted publically [sic].
I immediately wondered about this poem, this poet, and down the rabbit hole I went, to discover that Carl Sagan had been Diane Ackerman’s doctoral adviser at Cornell and that she had gone on to publish a collection of astronomy-inspired poems. It was out of print. I managed to procure a surviving copy and instantly fell under its spell — here was a kindred spirit just as wonder-smitten by reality, “knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm,” passionate and playful, “stricken / by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain / everythingness of everything, in cahoots / with the everythingness of everything else.” Here was someone who could see the “light engrossed in every object,” could fathom the “molecular / grit” of that light, could feel “the cold compress / of the universe” against this burning mortality impelling us to make meaning and make poems on a planet of such irrepressible aliveness, encircled by such inhospitable bodies as “Pluto, rock-ribbed as a die-hard comet,” “Neptune, whose breath is ammonia,” “Mercury, pockmarked / by the Sun’s yellow fever,” and the “agitated fossil” of Jupiter with its “whirlpools and burbling / aerosols little changed since the solar-system began.”
What emerges from these ravishing portraits of otherwise, the way a sculpture emerges from the marble cut away, is a love letter to this particular world, this improbable flotsam of the possible. “How shall I / celebrate the planet / that, even now, carries me / in its fruited womb?” Diane asks, “full of stagefright / and misgiving,” then goes on to sign the celestial body electric, arriving at the most fundamental question:
How can any system
observe itself?
And the poems answer: with systematic wonder.
Long available only as a lucky find in a dusty corner of a second-hand bookshop, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (public library) is now resurrected under Marginalian Editions. To celebrate its second life, I asked Diane, now approaching eighty, what has most surprised her about the universe, and the microcosm of the universe that is this life, since she wrote those dazzling poems in her twenties — a span of time in which we sequenced the human genome, invented the Internet, discovered gravitational waves and the Higgs boson and the first Earth-like planet orbiting another star, and then ten thousand more as the horizon of the observable universe spilled 93 billion light-years away from the awed eye that took 500 million years to go from trilobite to telescope.
Diane’s answer is nothing less than a prose poem:
Once, I thought the universe’s greatest gift was scale — those vaulting immensities of gas and dust, planets flaring like thoughts inside a skull of stars. But time, that sly astronomer, has shown me something subtler: how much of the same splendor hums within us and all of nature. The pulse of a leaf opening to sun, the quiet veer of a child’s attention, my own heartbeat a small percussion in ancient starlight — all are galaxies folded inward, universes in miniature.
What surprises me now is not just the infinite, but the intimate. That carbon dust became breath and laughter. That our cells remember ancient oceans. That every discovery, no matter how remote, begins with the same feral impulse: our roving curiosity reaching outward, hoping to belong to a larger story of life seeding itself throughout the universe. The Cosmos expands and so does our vertiginous curiosity, an old companion still sending sparks of wonder through the brief ribs of our lives.
In the author’s note to our new edition, Diane reflects on what had animated her when she wrote these eternal poems a lifetime ago:
I hoped that when readers closed the book they would feel a blend of rapture and responsibility — the sense that our little lives and the vast lives of other worlds are made of the same dust, bound by the same laws, and therefore implicated in one another’s fate. I hoped for a lingering awareness that the “cosmic” is not elsewhere: the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, the mold on bread, the storms on Jupiter, and the quiet in deep space are all chapters of a single ancestral story, and once you feel that kinship it becomes harder to treat other lives or other landscapes as expendable scenery.
I also hoped readers might feel a bridge between awe and stewardship: the knowledge that we are latecomers in an ancient universe who nonetheless possess a frightening and beautiful power to scar or to shelter the only world (at the moment) we know to be alive. I wanted that double sensation to persist—a childlike wonder before the everythingness of everything, and braided through it, the mature realization that wonder alone is not enough, that love of the cosmos must express itself as care for this particular planet, with all its ordinary (though often overlooked) natural miracles.
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.
2026-02-24 23:02:50
The great paradox of personhood is that the sum is simpler than its parts. We move through the world as a totality, fragmentary but indivisible, clothed in a costume of personality beneath which roil parts perpetually fighting for power, perpetually yearning for harmony. The person making the choices, the person bearing their consequences, and the person taking responsibility for them are rarely the same person. There is no pain like the pain of watching oneself overtaken by one’s most shameful parts — the chaotic, the compulsive, the ungenerous, the needy, governed by fear and lack, splattering confusion and distress over anyone who comes near.
To live with consciousness is to own all the parts but not be owned by any of them, to choose with clarity and composure which ones to act from. To love fully — oneself, or another — is to accept all the parts and cherish the totality.
D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) captures this with poetic precision in his personal credo, composed in response to the thirteen qualities Benjamin Franklin identified as the wisest parts of personhood — temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.
“The soul has many motions, many gods come and go,” Franklin had observed in recognition of our composite nature. “Know that you are responsible to the gods inside you and to the men in whom the gods are manifest.” Lawrence writes in response:
Here’s my creed, against Benjamin’s. This is what I believe:
“That I am I.”
“That my soul is a dark forest.”
“That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.”
“That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.”
“That I must have the courage to let them come and go.”
“That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.”There is my creed.
It is not easy living with those constant visitations from conflicting gods, each with a different dictate, impelling you toward a different path. What makes it all bearable is seeing this constellation of parts as a part of something greater still — a vast and coherent universe governed by immutable laws and immense forces that vanquish the grandiose smallness of the self and its warring fragments, that render life too great and total a miracle to be met with anything but a resounding “yes yes — please.”
Lawrence channels this perspectival consolation in his 1930 book Apocalypse (public library) — a reflection on The Book of Revelation, composed as he lay dying from tuberculosis in a sanatorium, not yet midway through his forties.
Observing that what we most long for is our “living unison,” he writes:
The vast marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul… There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
Complement with pioneering psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the conciliation of our inner conflicts and Scottish philosopher John Macmurray on the key to wholeness, then revisit Lawrence on the strength of sensitivity and the key to fully living.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-02-24 21:05:13
Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist, a reliquary of the violent collisions that forged our rocky planet lush with life and tore from its body our only satellite with its miraculous proportions that render randomness too small a word — exactly 400 times smaller than the Sun and exactly 400 times closer to Earth, so that each time it passes between the two, the Moon covers the face of our star perfectly, thrusting us into midday night: the rare wonder of a total solar eclipse.
It is impossible to know this and not see the miraculous in its nightly light.
Moonlight transforms the landscapes of daytime, dusts them with the numinous.
“The sky was a strange royal-blue with all but the brightest stars quenched, while on either side the mountains were transformed into silver barricades, as their quartz surfaces reflected the moonlight,” Dervla Murphy wrote in Pakistan.
“We found many pleasures for the eye and the intellect… in the play of intense silvery moonlight over the mountainous seas of ice,” Frederick Cook wrote in Antarctica.
“All the bay is flooded with moonlight and in that pale glow the snowy mountains appear whiter than snow itself,” Rockwell Kent wrote in Alaska.
I remember being small and lonely, those infinite summers in the mountains of Bulgaria, waiting for nightfall, waiting for the Moon to cast its soft light upon the sharp edges of tomorrow and give the bygone day something of the eternal.
Moonlight transforms the landscapes of the soul: It transported Leonard Cohen to where the good songs come from; Sylvia Plath found in it a haunting lens on the darkness of the mind; for Toni Morrison, loving moonlight was a measure of freedom; for Virginia Woolf, it was a magnifying lens for love as she beckoned her lover Vita to “dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight.”
I have encountered no more beautiful account of this dual transformation than a passage from Watership Down (public library) — the marvelous 1973 novel that began with a story Richard Adams dreamt up to entertain his two young daughters on a long car journey. Nested midway through his allegorical adventure tale of rabbits is Adams’s serenade to moonlight:
The full moon, well risen in a cloudless eastern sky, covered the high solitude with its light. We are not conscious of daylight as that which displaces darkness. Daylight, even when the sun is clear of clouds, seems to us simply the natural condition of the earth and air… We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight.
Adams exults in moonlight as one of those unbidden graces that give ordinary life a “singular and marvelous quality” — a grace that didn’t have to exist and is in this sense unnecessary, like many of the loveliest things in life, which C.S. Lewis captured in asserting that “friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself [and] has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
A century after Walt Whitman exulted that the Moon “commends herself to the matter-of-fact people by her usefulness, and makes her uselessness adored by poets, artists, and all lovers in all lands,” Adams writes:
Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse’s mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that even the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers.
These passages from Watership Down reminded me of a kindred reverie Aldous Huxley composed half a century before Adams in his music-inspired meditation on the universe and our place in it, contemplating the Moon as a mirror not of the Sun but of the soul. In a splendid counterpart to Paul Goodman’s spiritual taxonomy of silence, Huxley offers a spiritual taxonomy of moonlight:
The moon is a stone; but it is a highly numinous stone. Or, to be more precise, it is a stone about which and because of which men and women have numinous feelings. Thus, there is a soft moonlight that can give us the peace that passes understanding. There is a moonlight that inspires a kind of awe. There is a cold and austere moonlight that tells the soul of its loneliness and desperate isolation, its insignificance or its uncleanness. There is an amorous moonlight prompting to love — to love not only for an individual but sometimes even for the whole universe.
Complement with the story of the first surviving photograph of the Moon, which changed our relationship to the universe, then savor this lovely picture-book about the Moon.
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.
2026-02-24 19:45:53
“If you can fall in love again and again,” Henry Miller wrote as he contemplated the measure of a life well lived on the precipice of turning eighty, “if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.”
Seven years earlier, the great British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) considered the same abiding question at the same life-stage in a wonderful short essay titled “How to Grow Old,” penned in his eighty-first year and later published in Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (public library).
Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the dissolution of the personal ego into something larger. Drawing on the longstanding allure of rivers as existential metaphors, he writes:
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
In a sentiment which philosopher and comedian Emily Levine would echo in her stirring reflection on facing her own death with equanimity, Russell builds on the legacy of Darwin and Freud, who jointly established death as an organizing principle of modern life, and concludes:
The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
Portraits from Memory and Other Essays is an uncommonly potent packet of wisdom in its totality. Complement this particular fragment with Nobel laureate André Gide on how happiness increases with age, Ursula K. Le Guin on aging and what beauty really means, and Grace Paley on the art of growing older — the loveliest thing I’ve ever read on the subject — then revisit Russell on critical thinking, power-knowledge vs. love-knowledge, what “the good life” really means, why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness, and his remarkable response to a fascist’s provocation.
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.