The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “a burst of light”

School Prayer: Diane Ackerman’s Poetic Invitation to Attentive Presence as a Means of Transcendence and Secular Spirituality
School Prayer: Diane Ackerman’s Poetic Invitation to Attentive Presence as a Means of Transcendence and Secular Spirituality

A hymn to the numinous splendor of nature.

read article

Seneca on Grief and the Key to Resilience in the Face of Loss: An Extraordinary Letter to His Mother
Seneca on Grief and the Key to Resilience in the Face of Loss: An Extraordinary Letter to His Mother

“All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.”

read article

Italo Calvino on Racial Justice: The Beloved Italian Writer’s Stirring Account of the Early Civil Rights Movement and His Encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr.
Italo Calvino on Racial Justice: The Beloved Italian Writer’s Stirring Account of the Early Civil Rights Movement and His Encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr.

“What counts is what we are, and the way we deepen our relationship with the world and with others, a relationship that can be one of both love for all that exists and of desire for its transformation.”

read article

16 Overall Favorite Books of 2016
16 Overall Favorite Books of 2016

From loneliness to love to black holes, by way of Neil Gaiman, Annie Dillard, and Mary Oliver.

read article

The Greatest Science Books of 2016
The Greatest Science Books of 2016

From the sound of spacetime to time travel to the microbiome, by way of polar bears, dogs, and trees.

read article

A “Yellow Submarine” Love Story
A “Yellow Submarine” Love Story

“The garden of life is strewn with such dormant seeds and so much of art blossoms from their unwilled and unwillable awakenings.”

read article

Undersea: Rachel Carson’s Lyrical and Revolutionary 1937 Masterpiece Inviting Humans to Explore Earth from the Perspective of Other Creatures
Undersea: Rachel Carson’s Lyrical and Revolutionary 1937 Masterpiece Inviting Humans to Explore Earth from the Perspective of Other Creatures

“Against this cosmic background the lifespan of a particular plant or animal appears, not as drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.”

read article

The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece
The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

read article

The Best Children’s Books of 2016
The Best Children’s Books of 2016

From love to mortality to the lives of Einstein and Louise Bourgeois, by way of silence and the color of the wind.

read article

Thinking vs. Cognition: Hannah Arendt on the Difference Between How Art and Science Illuminate the Human Condition
Thinking vs. Cognition: Hannah Arendt on the Difference Between How Art and Science Illuminate the Human Condition

“The question whether thought has any meaning at all constitutes the same unanswerable riddle as the question for the meaning of life.”

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)