The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “culture”

Virginia Woolf on Self-Knowledge and the Blind Spots of Sympathy
Virginia Woolf on Self-Knowledge and the Blind Spots of Sympathy

“We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others… There is a virgin forest in each.”

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How to Savor Winter: A Century-Old Poetic Recipe for Bliss in the Bleakest Season
How to Savor Winter: A Century-Old Poetic Recipe for Bliss in the Bleakest Season

In praise of “the poetry of silence and darkness,” from which life emerges “fresher, fairer, sweeter for its long winter rest.”

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What Is Time: 200 Years of Ravishing Reflections, from Borges to Nina Simone
What Is Time: 200 Years of Ravishing Reflections, from Borges to Nina Simone

“The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity.”

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What America Means: Poet Muriel Rukeyser on the Source of Character and Creativity
What America Means: Poet Muriel Rukeyser on the Source of Character and Creativity

“Creation is a delicate and experimental thing… Knowledge and effective action here become one gesture; the gesture of understanding the world and changing it.”

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Favorite Books of 2022
Favorite Books of 2022

From Rumi to Blake to Nick Cave, by way of trees, hummingbirds, grief, and music.

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The Unphotographable: Henry Williamson on the Transcendence of the Winter Sky After a Blizzard
The Unphotographable: Henry Williamson on the Transcendence of the Winter Sky After a Blizzard

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Victorian Instagram: The 19th Century’s Most Adorable Natural History Illustrations of Monkeys, Lemurs, and Other Tree-Dwelling Mammals
Victorian Instagram: The 19th Century’s Most Adorable Natural History Illustrations of Monkeys, Lemurs, and Other Tree-Dwelling Mammals

A furry celebration of the dazzling variousness of this world.

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“Goodnight Moon” Author Margaret Wise Brown’s Radical and Rapturous Life, Illustrated
“Goodnight Moon” Author Margaret Wise Brown’s Radical and Rapturous Life, Illustrated

“Lives don’t work the way most books do… Lives are funny and sad, scary and comforting, beautiful and ugly, but not when they’re supposed to be, and sometimes all at the same time.”

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Nature and Transcendence: Emerson on How We Become Our Most Authentic Selves
Nature and Transcendence: Emerson on How We Become Our Most Authentic Selves

“Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance.”

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The Boltzmann Brain Paradox: An Animated Thought Experiment About the Hallucination of Reality
The Boltzmann Brain Paradox: An Animated Thought Experiment About the Hallucination of Reality

A pleasingly disorienting foray into the fundamental perplexity of life.

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