Bless hindsight for how it clarifies the confusions of time, for how precisely it plots the true highs and lows on the terrain map of life once the quakes of the moment have died down, for how dispassionately it reveals what was a fleeting enthusiasm and what a lifelong gift. It is good to have an annual hindsight ritual in one’s life and one’s work, the more so the more the two converge. Here are the twenty-five “best” Marginalian essays of 2025 — a composite measure of what you most loved reading and what I most loved writing, which never perfectly coincide. (Bless the otherness of minds.)

* * *

The Three Elements of the Good Life

Read it here.

* * *

Do Not Spare Yourself

Read it here.

* * *

An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days

Read it here.

* * *

How to Be a Lichen: Adaptive Strategies for the Vulnerabilities of Being Human from Nature’s Tiny Titans of Tenacity

Read it here.

* * *

A Defense of Joy

Read it here.

* * *

HOLD ON LET GO: Urns for Living and the Art of Trusting Time

Read it here.

* * *

How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself

Read it here.

* * *

The Coziest Place on the Moon: An Illustrated Fable about How to Live with Loneliness and What It Means to Love, Inspired by a Real NASA Discovery

Read it here.

* * *

Any Common Desolation

Read it here.

* * *

What a Weasel Knows: Annie Dillard on How to Live

Read it here.

* * *

How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo

Read it here.

* * *

The Stubborn Art of Turning Suffering into Strength: Václav Havel’s Extraordinary Letters from Prison

Read it here.

* * *

The Souls of Animals

Read it here.

* * *

How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship

Read it here.

* * *

Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning

Read it here.

* * *

By Contacts We Are Saved: The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Change, the Meaning of Faith, and the Courage of Heresy

Read it here.

* * *

Anima: One Woman’s Search for Meaning in the Footsteps of Bulgarian Mountain Shepherds

Read it here.

* * *

Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s Most Famous Poem

Read it here.

* * *

Forgiveness

Read it here.

* * *

Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success

Read it here.

* * *

Little Free Library Divinations: Searching for the Meaning of Life in Discarded Books and Found Objects

Read it here.

* * *

Carl Jung on Creativity

Read it here.

* * *

The Search for Meaning Cast in Clay: 19 Years of The Marginalian in 19 Ceramic Sentences

Read it here.

* * *

How Not to Waste Your Life

Read it here.

* * *

Favorite Books of 2025

Read it here.