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Introducing Marginalian Editions: Extraordinary Forgotten Books Brought Back...
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 and...
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The Art of Befriending Time and Change: Debbie Millman’s Illustrated Love...
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...
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Chance, Choice, and How to Claim Your Life
Only a fool or an egomaniac would deny that chance shapes the vast majority of life. The time, place, culture, family, body, brain, and biochemistry we are born into, the people who cross our path, the...
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States of Possession: Erich Neumann on Creativity, the Unconscious, and the...
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. They can...
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Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Brief Illustrated History of Earth and One Great...
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. Despite our...
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The Alchemy of Heartbreak and How to Live with Unrequited Love: The Story...
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 had...
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Ocean Vuong on Anger
“To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer,” Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary as a young artist. “The poets (by which I...
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Václav Havel on How to Live with Your Greatest Failure
Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is...
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Isotopes, Vikings, Mars
We are perishable matter yearning for meaning, and time is both the matter and the meaning of our lives. “Time is a river that sweeps me along but I am the river,” Borges wrote in 1940. “Time is the...
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Annie Dillard on Unselfconsciousness
Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York’s most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after...
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How Should You Live Your Life: Marie Howe’s Spare, Stunning Poem “The Maples”
“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in one of the most sobering opening pages in literature. So here you...
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The Pain and the God Within You: Carl Jung on the Relationship Between...
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 chatGPT to compose...
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Is Peace Possible
Is Peace Possible?, originally published in 1957, is the second title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition as it appears in on its pages. How ungenerous our culture has been...
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Owl Lake: A Vintage Treasure from Japanese Artist Keizaburo Tejima
That we will never know what it is like to be another — another person, another creature — is one of the most exasperating things in life, but also one of the most humbling, the most catalytic to our...
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Raising Hare: The Moving Story of How a Helpless Creature Helped a Workaholic...
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 free...
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The Wanting Monster: An Almost Unbearably Tender Illustrated Spell Against...
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 incomplete...
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Imagine Water Otherwise: Robert Macfarlane on the Personhood of Rivers and...
“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless “refutation” of time. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of...
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The One Hundred Milliseconds Between the World and You: Oliver Sacks on...
“If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake wrote, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” But we are finite creatures, in time and in space, and there is a limit to how much...
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Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning
This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine. “Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite...
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The Majesty of Mountains and the Mountains of the Mind
Mountains are some of our best metaphors for the mind and for the spirit, but they are also living entities, sovereign and staggering. I remember the first time I saw a mountain from an airplane —...
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