Maria Popova

1 week ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

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, whose bottomless love had nurtured the talent that would win him the Nobel Prize in his seventies; his mother, who had raised him alone after his father’s death when Elias was seven (the kind of “wound that turns into a lung through which you breathe,” he would later reflect).

1 week ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

Because we are creatures made of time, what we call suffering is at bottom a warping of time, a form of living against it and not with it — the pain of loss, aching for what has been and no longer is; the pain of longing, aching for what could be but is not yet and may never be; the pain of loneliness, an endless now hollowed of meaning.

2 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

The best measure of serenity may be our distance from the self — getting far enough to dim the glare of ego and quiet the din of the mind, with all its ruminations and antagonisms, in order to see the world more clearly, in order to hear more clearly our own inner voice, the voice that only ever speak of love. It is difficult to achieve this in society, where the wanting monster is always roaring and the tyranny of should reigns supreme. We need silence. We need solitude.

2 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

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 confusion with false certainties that stifle the willingness to understand (the nuances of the situation, the complexity of the wider context, what it’s like to be the other person) with the will to be right.

2 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

Born in present-day Iran (then Persia) months after the end of the First World War and raised on a farm in present-day Zimbabwe (then), Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen when she dropped out of school and eighty-eight when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, her long life spent writing keys to “the prisons we choose to live inside.” In 1957 — the year the British government decided to continue its hydrogen bomb tests, the year the pioneering Quaker X-ray...