Love, Music, Solitude, and How to Be More Alive: The Best of The Marginalian 2022
From Emily Dickinson to Bruce Springsteen, by way of galaxies and gardening.
By Maria Popova
It is an annual tradition to look back on the year’s readings and sieve the most nourishing — a tradition all the more vital and vitalizing in stormy years, when these oases of light are all the more precious.
Here is the usual composite “best” of the year — a hybrid of the pieces I poured the most heart into writing and the pieces most widely read and shared by those whose hearts they touched.
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The Eternal Lyric of Love and Loss: “Goodnight Moon” Author Margaret Wise Brown’s Little-Known Poems for the Tragic Love of Her Life
Read it here.
* * *
Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
Read it here.
* * *
The Third Thing: Poet Donald Hall on the Secret to Lasting Love
Read it here.
* * *
Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past
Read it here.
* * *
Bloom: The Evolution of Life on Earth and the Birth of Ecology (Joan As Police Woman Sings Emily Dickinson)
Read/watch it here.
* * *
Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness
Read it here.
* * *
The Thing Itself: C.S. Lewis on What We Long for in Our Existential Longing
Read it here.
* * *
How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James
Read it here.
* * *
Art as Living Amends: Nick Cave on Creativity as an Instrument of Self-Forgiveness and the Necessity of Hope in a Fragile World
Read it here.
* * *
Full Tilt: Dervla Murphy’s Fierce and Poetic Account of Traversing the World on Two Wheels in the 1960s
Read it here.
* * *
The Bittersweet Story of the Real-Life Peaceful Bull Who Inspired Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s Ferdinand
Read it here.
* * *
What Happens When We Die
Read it here.
* * *
Games People Play: The Revolutionary 1964 Model of Human Relationships That Changed How We (Mis)Understand Ourselves and Each Other
Read it here.
* * *
3 Things to Learn from a Child, 7 from a Thief: Bob Dylan’s Favorite Hasidic Teaching
Read it here.
* * *
Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island
Read it here.
* * *
How to Bear Your Fear and What It Means to Love: A Tender Meditation in Ink, Watercolor, and Wonder
Read it here.
* * *
My God, It’s Full of Stars: Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and Our Human Hunger to Know the Universe (Tracy K. Smith Reads Tracy K. Smith)
Read/watch it here.
* * *
The Fragile Species: A Forgotten Masterpiece of Perspective on How to Live with Ourselves and Each Other
Read it here.
* * *
200 Years of Great Writers and Artists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Gardening
Read it here.
* * *
The Cello and the Nightingales: Beatrice Harrison and How the World’s First Fake News United Humanity in Our First Collective Empathy for Nature
Read it here.
* * *
How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older
Read it here.
* * *
Nina Simone’s Gum and the Shimmering Strangeness of How Art Casts Its Transcendent Spell on Us
Read it here.
Dirge Without Music: Emmy Noether, Symmetry, and the Conservation of Energy (Amanda Palmer Reads Edna St. Vincent Millay, Animated by Sophie Blackall)
Read it here.
* * *
The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular
Read it here.
* * *
How to Be Un-Dead: Anaïs Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully
Read it here.
* * *
Storytelling and the Art of Tenderness: Olga Tokarczuk’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
Read it here.
* * *
The Milky Way, the Pond, and the Meaning of Life: Thoreau on Solitude, Sympathy, and the Salve for Melancholy
Read it here.
* * *
M.C. Escher on Loneliness, Creativity, and How Rachel Carson Inspired His Art, with a Side of Bach
Read it here.
* * *
The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”
Read it here.
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Published December 29, 2022
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https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/12/29/best-of-2022/
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