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The Marginalian - Education & Personal Development
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Why Bats Shouldn’t Exist: The Limits of Knowledge, the Pitfalls of Prediction, and the Triumph of the Possible Over the Probable – The Marginalian
Prediction is the sharpest tool the human animal has devised — the chisel with which we sculpted survival out of chance, the fulcrum by which we lifted civilization out of survival. Among the…
Uncoding Creativity in the Age of AI: What Makes a Great Poem, What Makes a Great Storyteller, and What Makes Us Human – The Marginalian
I once asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a dozen couplets of cliches that touched nothing, changed nothing in me. The AI had the wh…
Vision of the Womb and Vision of the Brain: H.D. on the Two Kinds of Seeing and the Key to Over-mind Consciousness – The Marginalian
“One must be a seer, make oneself a seer,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.” As more and more of our senses are being a…
Uncaging the Bird in the Mind: William Henry Hudson and the Gift of the Ruin of Your Best Laid Plans – The Marginalian
“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” wrote Milton in Paradise Lost. Because the mind (which may in the end be a full-body phenomenon)…
Against Death: Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti on Grieving a Parent, Grieving the World, and What Makes Life Worth Living – The Marginalian
The year is 1937. Elias Canetti (July 25, 1905–August 14, 1994) — Bulgarian, Jewish, living in Austria as the Nazis are rising to power — has just lost his mother; his mother, who…
The Arguers: A Charming Illustrated Parable about the Absurdity of Self-righteousness – The Marginalian
Perhaps the most perilous consequence of uncertain times, times that hurl us into helplessness and disorientation, is that they turn human beings into opinion machines. We dope our pain and confusi…
The Wanting Monster: An Almost Unbearably Tender Illustrated Spell Against the Curse of Not Enough – The Marginalian
Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life …
Raising Hare: The Moving Story of How a Helpless Creature Helped a Workaholic Wake Up from the Trance of Near-living and Rewild Her Soul – The Marginalian
Narrow the aperture of your attention enough to take in any one thing fully, and it becomes a portal to everything. Anneal that attention enough so that you see whatever and whoever is before you f…
The Pain and the God Within You: Carl Jung on the Relationship Between Psychological Suffering and Creativity – The Marginalian
When AI first began colonizing language — which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss between us, a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents — I asked ch…
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s Most Famous Poem – The Marginalian
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I…
Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Brief Illustrated History of Earth and One Great Truth about Love – The Marginalian
We are always either drawing closer or drifting apart — there is no stasis in relationships. The direction of movement may change over the course of a relationship, but there is no stasis. De…
States of Possession: Erich Neumann on Creativity, the Unconscious, and the Psychology of Transformation – The Marginalian
There are things in life that come over you sudden as a flash flood, total as an eclipse — the great loves, the great creative passions, the great urges to conquer a mountain or a theorem. Th…
The Art of Befriending Time and Change: Debbie Millman’s Illustrated Love Letter to Gardening as a Portal to Self-discovery – The Marginalian
You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that…
Introducing Marginalian Editions: Extraordinary Forgotten Books Brought Back to Life – The Marginalian
I have become a person on the pages and in the margins of books. In nearly two decades of reckoning with my reading in writing, it has been my ongoing lamentation to see works of enduring beauty an…
How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship – The Marginalian
It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most heali…
How to Be More Alive: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent on Breaking the Trance of Near-living – The Marginalian
The point, of course, is to make yourself alive — to feel the force of being in your sinew and your spirit, to tremble with the beauty and the terror of it all, to breathe lungfuls of life th…