#ThemArginalian

I was a latecomer to poetry, curling my nose at it in that confounding and rather embarrassing way we have of discounting what we don’t understand, dismissing as useless what we don’t k…

It is the sunset of the 1600s. Milton has just pioneered the use of the word space to connote outer space. Kepler has just pioneered science fiction by imagining space travel, but going only as far…

Every act of learning is an act of intellectual appropriation, incorporating someone else’s knowledge into your own mental library. Every act of empathy is an act of emotional appropriation, …

“There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two world wars. There are many species of despair — the private despair of ill health and heartbreak…

Along the way of life, I have discovered three things you can almost always do in your darkest hour that almost never fail to recover the light: Learn something. Help someone. Feel it all. We need …

“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Stephen Hawking wondered, recognizing the quixotic nature of his quest for a theory of ever…

Fifteen years into reading and writing in order to learn how to live, I looked back on these marginalia on the search for meaning and realized that the people whose lives and work have most moved m…

The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of fact, that it bubbles up from the bottom of reality once the mind attains enough fathoms of factuality. But objective reality — all tho…

“Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated,” Simone Weil wrote in her soulful meditation on the paradox of cl…

“We can never go back,” bell hooks wrote in her moving reckoning with love. “We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the l…

The most assuring thing about life is that we can change, that things can change, that they are always changing. The most maddening is that despite living in a universe that is one constant transmu…

One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi…

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,…

“Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”

The summer I turned forty, my maternal grandmother, then ninety, gave me an astonishing embroidery she had completed it when she was my age after, having worked on it for years. The cascading geome…

“In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity.”

“If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God… he does not come to us from books, he lives within us… This God is in you too. He is m…

“If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others.”