The Marginalian

Hello, I'm Maria Popova, and Brain Pickings is my heartfelt project dedicated to exploring what it truly means to live a meaningful and joyful life. I started this journey in 2006 as a weekly email to just seven friends. Over time, it grew into an online platform, and it is now part of the permanent web archive at the Library of Congress. Brain Pickings serves as a reflection of my personal growth—intellectually, creatively, spiritually, and poetically—drawing insights from literature, science, art, philosophy, and various aspects of human thought and emotion. It is a personal exploration fueled by the fundamental questions and the deep sense of wonder that connects us all.

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Against Death: Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti on Grieving a Parent, Grieving the World, and What Makes Life Worth Living

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).
The Whole of It

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.
Silence, Solitude, and the Art of Surrender: Pico Iyer on Finding the World in a Benedictine Monastery

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.
The Arguers: A Charming Illustrated Parable about the Absurdity of Self-righteousness

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.
Against the Pleasurable Luxury of Despair and the Aridity of Self-pity: Doris Lessing on the Artist’s Task in Trying Times

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...
The Grammar of Fantasy and the Fantastic Binomial: Beloved Italian Children’s Book Author Gianny Rodari on Creativity and the Key to Great Storytelling

3 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

I was eight when I first grasped the power of storytelling. One night, my mother presented me with a book titled Telephone Tales, published the year she was born. Night after night, page after page, it cast an enchantment, but it was one particular story that kept me up. “The Air Vendor” was a cautionary fable about a man who devised a way to bottle and sell air, until everyone on Earth had no choice but to become his customer in order to keep breathing.
The Majesty of Mountains and the Mountains of the Mind

3 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

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 — forests miniaturized to moss, rivers to capillaries, the Earth crumpled like a first draft. It is a sublime sight in the proper sense of the word — transcendent yet strangely terrifying in its vantage so unnatural to an earthbound biped, so deliriously and disquietingly godly.
Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning

3 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

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 having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?”Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician.
The One Hundred Milliseconds Between the World and You: Oliver Sacks on Perception

3 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

“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 reality we can bear — evolution gave us consciousness so that we may sieve the salient from the infinite, equipped it with attention so that we may narrow the aperture of perception to take in only what is relevant to us from the immense vista of now.
Imagine Water Otherwise: Robert Macfarlane on the Personhood of Rivers and the Meaning of Aliveness

4 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

“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 life,” Nietzsche wrote a century earlier in his directive on how to find yourself. But rivers are not just metaphors for life — they are its substance and sinew. They vein this rocky planet into a living world, a world whose mind is nerved and axoned with rivers.