The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “michael pollan”

May Sarton on Writing, Gardening, and the Importance of Patience Over Will in Creative Work
May Sarton on Writing, Gardening, and the Importance of Patience Over Will in Creative Work

“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone.”

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Myths, Facts, and Poetic Truth: Amy Lowell on Legends as a Lens on Our Elemental Limitations and Powers
Myths, Facts, and Poetic Truth: Amy Lowell on Legends as a Lens on Our Elemental Limitations and Powers

“Legends… are bits of fact, or guesses at fact, pressed into the form of a story and flung out into the world as markers of how much ground has been travelled.”

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The Healing Power of Nature and Beauty: Florence Nightingale on Expediting Recovery from Illness and Burnout
The Healing Power of Nature and Beauty: Florence Nightingale on Expediting Recovery from Illness and Burnout

“People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too.”

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Broken Tulips: How a Virus Gave the World’s Most Prized Flower Its Beauty
Broken Tulips: How a Virus Gave the World’s Most Prized Flower Its Beauty

An epochal intersection of art and science, ecology and culture, psychology and microbiology.

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Kierkegaard on the Spiritual and Sensual Power of Music, the Essence of Genius, and the Key to a Timeless Work of Art
Kierkegaard on the Spiritual and Sensual Power of Music, the Essence of Genius, and the Key to a Timeless Work of Art

“If Mozart ever became wholly comprehensible to me, he would for the first time become wholly incomprehensible to me.”

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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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The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”
The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”

Recovering the “forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence” alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds.

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Orwell’s Roses: Rebecca Solnit on How Nature Sustains Us, Beauty as Fuel for Change, and the Value of the Meaningless Things That Give Our Lives Meaning
Orwell’s Roses: Rebecca Solnit on How Nature Sustains Us, Beauty as Fuel for Change, and the Value of the Meaningless Things That Give Our Lives Meaning

“What is it that makes it possible to do the work that is of highest value to others and one’s central purpose in life? It may appear — to others, sometimes even to oneself — trivial, irrelevant, indulgent, pointless, distracted, or any of those other pejoratives with which the quantifiable beats down the unquantifiable.”

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The Music of Trees: Improvisation, Iteration, and the Science of Immortality
The Music of Trees: Improvisation, Iteration, and the Science of Immortality

“Potentially, every tree is immortal.”

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The Six Steps to Cosmic Consciousness: A Pioneering Theory of Transcendence by the 19th-Century Psychiatrist and Adventurer Maurice Bucke
The Six Steps to Cosmic Consciousness: A Pioneering Theory of Transcendence by the 19th-Century Psychiatrist and Adventurer Maurice Bucke

We are not “patches of life scattered through an infinite sea of non-living substance” but “specks of relative death in an infinite ocean of life.”

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