2026-01-17 00:31:11
The astonishing thing is that even though we will never truly know what it is like to be another creature or another person or any configuration of chemistry and chance other than ourselves, we are made of the same matter as the granite that will mark our graves and share 98% of our DNA with the moss that will cover them. We share with them and with each other more than atoms — we share the wild luck of having drawn from the cosmic lottery this world of birdsong and waterfalls and lichen and spring, none of which had to exist, all of which could have been and can always be otherwise.
To know this, to place the firm hand of the mind on this banister of reality, is to steady yourself amid the daily shocks of living. To feel it is something else entirely — it is to press this perishable hand against the beating heart of the universe that made it and tremble with its pulse in your veins.
That is what Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) offers in an exquisite passage from his journals, penned after visiting Paris’s famous botanical garden just as its new mineralogy gallery was being built to house six hundred thousand stones, gems, and fossils.
A century after William Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand, before William Henry Hudson saw “the wonderfulness and eternal mystery of life itself” in a nautilus, before Charles Darwin invited us to see nature as a living library of “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” the thirty-year-old Emerson writes:
The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms — the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes, the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient, in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer, an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me, cayman, carp, eagle and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies.
To feel this universal kinship bestows upon us a kind of moral obligation to live our own lives as fully and rightly as possible — something Emerson would come to articulate nearly a decade later in his essay “Compensation”:
The universe is represented in everyone of its particles. Everything in nature contains all the powers of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff… Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny.
The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on eternity, — all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every act… The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point… Thus is the universe alive.
Couple with quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger on how to know the universe in you, then revisit Emerson on transcendence, authenticity, how to trust yourself.
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.
2026-01-15 04:39:07
Time is the book we fill with the story of our lives. All great storytelling has the shape of music. All music is a shelter in time. In these lives hounded by restlessness, trembling with urgency, we need this shelter, need a place still enough and quiet enough to hear the story of our becoming, the song of life evolution encoded in our cells: “Life is exquisitely a time-thing, like music,” wrote the pioneering marine biologist Ernest Everett Just as he was revolutionizing our understanding of what makes life alive.
Rebecca West (December 21, 1892–March 15, 1983) offers an uncommonly insightful meditation on how music can help us befriend the fundamental dimension of our lives in her 1941 masterwork Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (public library), which I hold to be one of the past century’s great works of philosophy — her lyrical reckoning with art and survival lensed through three visits to Yugoslavia between the world wars, exploring what makes us and keeps us human.
West recounts a painful moment of political tension at a restaurant table, suddenly interrupted by a Mozart symphony flooding in from the radio box, making “an argument too subtle and profound to be put into words” — an argument for the breadth of time, for how it can hold and heal our longings and losses. With the touching humility of acknowledging the limitations of one’s gift and craft, she writes:
Music can deal with more than literature… Art covers not even a corner of life, only a knot or two here and there, far apart and without relation to the pattern. How could we hope that it would ever bring order and beauty to the whole of that vast and intractable fabric, that sail flapping in the contrary winds of the universe? Yet the music had promised us, as it welled forth from the magic box in the wall over our heads, that all should yet be well with us, that sometime our life should be as lovely as itself.
The greatest music offers something even greater than itself — an amelioration of the most subterranean struggle of human life: our anxiety about time. West writes:
The major works of Mozart… never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust… It is, indeed, inadequate to call the means of creating such an effect a mere technical device. For it changes the content of the work in which it is used, it presents a vision of the world where man is no longer the harassed victim of time but accepts its discipline and establishes a harmony with it. This is not a little thing, for our struggle with time is one of the most distressing of our fundamental conflicts, it holds us back from the achievement and comprehension that should be the justification of our life.
One morning, West follows a waterfall up the river to its source across “a broad and handsome valley,” toward a lake that splits into two streams linked by a dilapidated village nestled in flowering trees. There, she encounters music wholly different from Mozart’s yet just as elemental, just as much a benediction of time in its syncopation of urgency and silence:
From the latticed upper story of one of the houses that were rotting among their lilacs there sounded a woman’s voice, a deep voice that was not the less wise because it was permeated with the knowledge of pleasure, singing a Bosnian song, full of weariness at some beautiful thing not thoroughly achieved… Later, standing on a bridge, watching water clear as air comb straight the green weeds on the piers, we heard another such voice… urgent in its desire to bring out beauty from the throat, urgent to state a problem in music. Both these women made exquisite, exciting use of a certain feature peculiar to these Balkan songs. Between each musical sentence there is a long, long pause. It is as if the speaker put her point, and then the universe confronted her with its silence, with the reality she wants to alter by proving her point. Are you quite sure, it asks, that you are right?
That may be what we can learn from music, what it means to have a harmonious relationship with time — training the mind to be unhurried, to halt the rush of certainty just enough to remain curious, to press an ear to the silence of the universe and listen for the clear sound of who and what we are.
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.
2026-01-14 06:47:50
There are times in life when the continent of certainty parts underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains darkness upon us, we are asked to swim in the rivers of lava that will make the new. “Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask,” wrote Virginia Woolf of such times, “those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore.” Unlike her staunchly secularized contemporaries, who shuddered to speak of the soul for fear of being seen as anti-intellectual, Woolf devoted her life to communicating from and with “all these wayward parts that constitute the human soul,” which she knew lives on a level deeper than the self to make us who we are. It is what is left to us and of us in those volcanic times of darkness and uncertainty. It is what rebuilds the world, within and without, and what always has. It is the world. We still use Kepler’s laws of planetary motion to land rovers on Mars, but we are yet to catch up to his model of the world as an ensouled body — a notion dating back to Plato, whose political precepts we still use and whose concept of anima mundi, or “world soul,” we are yet to heed.
Epochs after Plato and Kepler and Woolf, trauma therapist Francis Weller offers a field guide to fortifying the soul in his essay collection In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty (public library). Two centuries after Alexander von Humboldt invented modern nature with his recognition that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation,” Weller insists that a correct view of human nature must be rooted in a recognition of “our ongoing relationship with the anima mundi,” of “how fully our lives are entangled with one another, with the stand of oaks, the night herons, the marginalized, the brokenhearted.”
Observing that “soul navigates the twining trail between sovereignty and intimacy,” he writes:
We have clearly entered the Long Dark… It is the realm of soul — of whispers and dreams, mystery and imagination, death and ancestors. It is an essential territory, both inevitable and required, offering a form of soul gestation that may gradually give shape to our deeper lives, personally and communally. Certain things can happen only in this grotto of darkness. Think of the wild network of roots and microbes, mycelia, and minerals, making possible all that we see in the day world, or the extensive networks within our own bodies, bringing blood, nutrients, oxygen, and thought to our corporeal lives. All of it happening in the darkness. We must become fluent in the manners and ways of soul.
[…]
We are tumbling through a rough initiation. Radical alterations are occurring in our inner and outer landscapes. It is simultaneously deeply personal and wildly collective, binding us to one another.
A century after Bertrand Russell called for “a largeness of contemplation” in his wonderful calibration of perspective amid the darkness of the world’s first global war, Weller writes:
It is a time to become immense.
To become immense means to recall how embedded we are in an animate world — a world that dreams and enchants, a world that excites our imaginations and conjures our affections through its stunning beauty. Everything we need is here. We only need to remember the wider embrace of our belonging to woodlands and prairies, marshlands, and neighborhoods, to the old stories and the tender gestures of a friend. To become immense also includes the radical act of welcoming all of who we are into the story. Nothing excluded. We become large through accepting all aspects of our being — weakness and need, loneliness and sorrow, shame and fear — everything seen as essential to our wholeness, our immensity.
This immensity, Weller insists, is singularly called forth by precisely those periods of darkness and uncertainty we feel too small to fathom, to fight, to break through — the times when the order of the world as we know it has turned to chaos, out of which a new world can’t but be born. He writes:
When the ordinary fades, when the familiar rhythms and patterns of shared living erode, something is activated within the soul. Hidden invitations and initiations arise in a time of uncertainty. The soul recognizes the markers of descent — darkness, sorrow, anxiety — as requiring radical change. The conditions of trouble and uncertainty activate some profound movement toward alterations in the psychic landscape. These are the precise times when the possibility for shifts in the collective field occurs.
Couple In the Absence of the Ordinary, in the remainder of which Weller goes on to offer “ways to foster an intimacy with the world of soul and the soul of the world.” with this lighthouse for dark times, then revisit Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön on transformation through difficult times and Swiss poet, philosopher, and linguist Jean Gebser’s vision for the evolution of our civilizational consciousness.
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.
2026-01-12 01:48:16
“My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite… and I know the amplitude of time,” wrote Walt Whitman, knowing what stone teaches about trusting time.
It tempers your sorrows to know that the striking red pebble you pick up at the beach is hematite — the oxidation of iron in sedimentary rock, the same iron composing the hemoglobin that oxygenates your red blood cells; to know that some distant day across the eons, someone else will bend down wonder-smitten on some other beach to pick up a striking pebble laced with red that was once your blood. It is more than a comfort — it is a consecration. The word “holy” shares its Latin root with “whole” and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things. This is the sacred, this the holy. To feel part of the implicate order of the whole. To touch for a moment the wrist of the world, feel the pulse of life’s bloodstream coursing through it, feel yourself a corpuscle and a miracle.
“The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth,” wrote Rachel Carson. To know that you carry sediment in your cells and that you will return to sediment is to be a living poem.
Laura Poppick offers a wondrous portal into this deeper dimension of time in Strata: Stories from Deep Time (public library) — a fine belated addition to my favorite books of 2025.
Recounting a revelatory shift in perspective while hiking Wyoming’s Bighorn Canyon under the weight of the world’s ecological and political tumult, she writes:
As I sat on that pale plateau with my legs beneath me… I remembered that stability has come and gone and returned so many times before now. That geologic timescales arc too wide to witness in a single human lifetime, but have always spun toward some sort of new stasis. I knew this didn’t let us off the hook, or mean that it was time to stop righting our wrongs to the environment. The changes we have unleashed today are unfolding far faster than past periods of change, and they were not geologically inevitable. We are the agents of this geologic moment. But the strata reminded me that we are also part of the Earth system, this much larger web of connections that thread between the atmosphere, continents, water, ice, and life. That these threads slacken and tighten over time and accommodate for one another with more brilliance than the human mind can easily grasp. That we live within this system, and the system lives within us. We carry its iron in our blood and its stardust in our bones, and its strength is our strength because we are it.
We are it, but we are not a given. The only given is the change and the sphere that contains it.
To apprehend the sphere stills the suffering of separateness. Echoing John Muir’s insistence that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Poppick paints the sphere in its dazzling, tessellated completeness:
Air, rock, water, life, and ice all interact in the web of feedback loops that geoscientists call the Earth system. Together, the five facets of this system — the atmosphere (air), lithosphere (rock), hydrosphere (water), biosphere (life), and cryosphere (ice) — orchestrate the global climate and, in turn, the underpinnings of our lives. It’s by coming to understand this system that I have grown to see the physical world not as the static backdrop of our daily experience but as an ever-changing vessel that ripples and responds to innumerable changes, and has been doing so for billions of years. Over time, these subtle transformations build, erode, and rebuild the world anew. We live our lives within recycled landscapes and those recycled landscapes live within us.
I mean this literally, not figuratively. The science is the poem and the poem is the science. Everything on this planet connects with everything else, from the microscopic contents of the air we breathe to the macroscopic movements of continents and ocean currents. You can’t build a mountain range without changing the atmosphere, at least a little (because freshly sculpted mountains pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere), and you can’t change the atmosphere without changing the chemistry of the ocean (because oceans absorb and release carbon dioxide), and you can’t change the ocean without affecting the life within it.
Paradoxically, to contact all this change, to see in silt the memorial of mountains and in mountains the memory of the Earth, is to remember the eternity in you. Recounting a rainy visit to a “golden spike” — an outcrop whose strata represent the transition from one geological period to another — Poppick writes:
The traces of the early Cambrian sat unblinking beneath the rain, telling us with a wordless wisdom that there are beginnings and that there are ends and that the fibers of the planet will always harden and soften and dissolve and re-form anew. That our own legacy will, some day, erode back into the sea.
[…]
The gift of geology is the chance to seek refuge in this constancy, in the gravity of the arc of time. When I walk the rocky shoreline near my home, I don’t see random stones thrown about but a montage of stories and events that intertwine directly with our present and our future.
[…]
If there’s one thing we can say with certainty has remained constant since at least the Archean, it’s the persistent tug of water against rock and the erosion that comes with it. The breaking down of Earth’s skin and bones to make room for something new. The motion is at once unchanging and the most persistent force of change. It is carving down boulders into cobbles into pebbles into sands, silts, clays. It is turning land into dust and sending its debris back to the sea it came from. By the time the seafloors of today rise up above the oceans as cliffsides or mountaintops, our individual lives will be specks of dust, imperceptible to the naked eye. The iron in our blood will have pooled back into the earth, all our remains melting within the mantle where we will meet, again, as one.
Complement Strata with geologist turned psychologist Ruth Allen on the twelve kinds of time and geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s love letter to the wisdom of rocks, then revisit Oliver Sacks on deep time and the interconnectedness 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.
2026-01-10 02:46:31
The light was always there — our star is a hundred million years older than our planet — but it was learning to see it, to harness it, to transform it, that made this rocky planet a living world: photoreceptors converting sunlight to sugar to green the Earth, eyes co-evolving with consciousness to give us books and beauty and blue.
On the smallest daily scale of our tiny transient lives, our experience of life still hinges on how we see the light of the world and how we refract it through the lens of the mind.
The light of sunrise streaming through the rustling leaves of the maple to cast a dancing flame on your kitchen floor.
The glowing blade of grass backlit by the late-morning light.
The light of sunset on the smiling face of the person you don’t yet know, yet know, will become your lover.
The ten thousand flickering lights you see when you are landing home, each a human life both unaware of and indivisible from all the others.
Midway through the lyrical record of her pioneering expedition to Labrador, Mina Hubbard (April 15, 1870–May 4, 1956) breaks into what can best be described as part prose poem reverencing the light, part prayer for a way of seeing that never loses sight of it:
Sometimes towards evening in dreary November, when the clouds hang heavy and low, covering all the sky, and the hills are solemn and sombre, and the wind is cold, and the lake black and sullen, a break in the dark veil lets through a splash of glorious sunshine. It is so very beautiful as it falls into the gloom that your breath draws in quick and you watch it with a thrill. Then you see that it moves towards you. All at once you are in the midst of it, it is falling round you and seems to have paused as if it meant to stay with you and go no farther. While you revel in this wonderful light that has stopped to enfold you, suddenly it is not falling round you any more, and you see it moving steadily on again, out over the marsh with its bordering evergreens, touching with beauty every place it falls upon, forward up the valley, unwavering, without pause, till you are holding your breath as it begins to climb the hills away yonder. It is gone. The smoke blue clouds hang lower and heavier, the hills stand more grimly solemn and sombre, the wind is cold, the lake darker and more sullen, and the beauty has gone out of the marsh. Then — then it is night. But you do not forget the Light. You know it still shines — somewhere.
Couple with a blind hero of the French resistance on how to live in light, then revisit Oliver Sacks on how love gilds the light of life.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-01-07 23:25:43
Two centuries ago, a small group of brilliant and troubled young people trembling with the unprocessed traumas of their childhoods laid in their poems and letters and journals the foundational modern mythos of love. Although none but one of them lived past their thirties, they touched the lives of generations to come with their art and their ideas about life.
We call them the Romantics, keep quoting their poems in our vows and keep paging through their textbook for suffering.
Pulsating through our culture as unexamined dogma is their idea that there is a hierarchy of the affections and that romantic love sits at the top as the organizing principle of our emotional lives, the aim and the end of our existential longing. It is a religion that even people with extraordinary capacity for critical thinking in other domains of life tend not to question. And yet when we let our hearts be large enough and real enough, we discover that there is but a porous and permeable membrane between friendship and passion, that collaboration is a form of intimacy, that family can mean many different things and look many different ways; we discover that romantic love is overwhelmingly a relation not between complete human beings but between idealized selves and mutual projections — the most powerful prompt for fantasy the creative imagination has invented.
The Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) offers a sobering antidote to the cult of romantic love in a passage from The Book of Disquiet (public library) — the posthumously published masterpiece that also gave us Pessoa on how to be a good explorer in the lifelong expedition to yourself and how to unself into who you really are. He writes:
Romantic love is a rarefied product of century after century of Christian influence, and everything about its substance and development can be explained to the unenlightened by comparing it to a suit fashioned by the soul or the imagination and used to clothe those whom the mind thinks it fits, when they happen to come along.
But every suit, since it isn’t eternal, lasts as long as it lasts; and soon, under the fraying clothes of the ideal we’ve formed, the real body of the person we dressed it in shows through.
Romantic love is thus a path to disillusion, unless this disillusion, accepted from the start, decides to vary the ideal constantly, constantly sewing new suits in the soul’s workshops so as to constantly renew the appearance of the person they clothe.
The standard romantic model is in this sense a warping of the deepest, truest kind of love — the kind Iris Murdoch so perfectly defined as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real… the discovery of reality.” Romantic love, Pessoa observes, is the flight from reality into fantasy, the projection of oneself onto the other:
We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept — our own selves — that we love.
[…]
The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say “I love you” or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul’s activity.
Couple with Iris Murdoch on how to see more clearly and love more purely, then revisit Martha Nussbaum’s superb litmus test for how to know whether you really love a person and Simone de Beauvoir on how two souls can interact with one another in a meaningful way.
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.