The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “art”

Big Wolf & Little Wolf: A Tender Tale of Loneliness, Belonging, and How Friendship Transforms Us
Big Wolf & Little Wolf: A Tender Tale of Loneliness, Belonging, and How Friendship Transforms Us

A subtle meditation on the meaning of solidarity, the relationship between the ego and the capacity for love, and the little tendrils of care that become the armature of friendship.

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The Little-Known Visual Art of E.E. Cummings
The Little-Known Visual Art of E.E. Cummings

“Why do you paint? For exactly the same reason I breathe.”

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The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel
The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”

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Take Fate by the Throat: Beethoven on Creative Vitality and Resilience in the Face of Suffering
Take Fate by the Throat: Beethoven on Creative Vitality and Resilience in the Face of Suffering

“Day by day I am approaching the goal which I apprehend but cannot describe.”

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How We Bridge the Real and the Ideal: Frederick Douglass on Art as a Tool of Constructive Self-Criticism and a Force of Cultural Progress
How We Bridge the Real and the Ideal: Frederick Douglass on Art as a Tool of Constructive Self-Criticism and a Force of Cultural Progress

“The process by which man is able to posit his own subjective nature outside of himself … is at [the] bottom of all effort and the germinating principles of all reform and all progress.”

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W.E.B. Du Bois’s Little-Known, Arresting Modernist Data Visualizations of Black Life for the World’s Fair of 1900
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Little-Known, Arresting Modernist Data Visualizations of Black Life for the World’s Fair of 1900

A trailblazing effort “to give, in as systematic and compact a form as possible, the history and present condition of a large group of human beings.”

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Poetry and the Revolution of Being: Jane Hirshfield on How Great Art Transforms Us
Poetry and the Revolution of Being: Jane Hirshfield on How Great Art Transforms Us

“Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?… And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share.”

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The Art of Living with Wide-Open Consciousness: Alice James on Attentiveness as the Pulse-Beat of Art
The Art of Living with Wide-Open Consciousness: Alice James on Attentiveness as the Pulse-Beat of Art

“There are some people… who drive everywhere and admire nothing.”

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the Dangerous Myth of the Suffering Artist and What Makes Life Worth Living
Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the Dangerous Myth of the Suffering Artist and What Makes Life Worth Living

A beautiful clarion call for making creative work “the filling joy of your life” no matter how difficult the cards you’ve been dealt.

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Sam Shepard in Praise of Writing Letters as an Incomparable Art of Human Connection and a Creative Practice
Sam Shepard in Praise of Writing Letters as an Incomparable Art of Human Connection and a Creative Practice

An ode to the art of relationship sculpted in time.

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