The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “presence”

The Afterlives of the Soul: Sister Nivedita on Love and Death
The Afterlives of the Soul: Sister Nivedita on Love and Death

“To the soul, time does not exist. Only her own great purpose exists, shining clear and steady through the mists before her.”

read article

Jealousy and Its Antidote: Pioneering Psychiatrist Leslie Farber on the Tangled Psychology of Our Most Destructive Emotion
Jealousy and Its Antidote: Pioneering Psychiatrist Leslie Farber on the Tangled Psychology of Our Most Destructive Emotion

“Every jealous person knows jealousy to be a brutally degrading experience and resists with all his might revealing the extent of his degradation.”

read article

May Sarton on Grieving a Pet
May Sarton on Grieving a Pet

“It is absolutely inward and private, the relation between oneself and an animal.”

read article

2,000 Years of Kindness
2,000 Years of Kindness

From Marcus Aurelius to Einstein, poets and philosophers on the deepest wellspring of our humanity.

read article

The Balancing Monsters of Love: Leonard Cohen on What Makes a Saint
The Balancing Monsters of Love: Leonard Cohen on What Makes a Saint

On loving the world enough to surrender to the laws of gravity and chance.

read article

The Art of Lying Fallow: Psychoanalyst Masud Khan on the Existential Salve for the Age of Cultish Productivity and Compulsive Distraction
The Art of Lying Fallow: Psychoanalyst Masud Khan on the Existential Salve for the Age of Cultish Productivity and Compulsive Distraction

On inviting the state of being that “allows for that larval inner experience which distinguishes true psychic creativity from obsessional productiveness.”

read article

From Youth to Age: Kahlil Gibran on the Art of Becoming Yourself
From Youth to Age: Kahlil Gibran on the Art of Becoming Yourself

A roadmap to the fulfilled belonging on the other side of “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great.”

read article

May Sarton on How to Cultivate Your Talent
May Sarton on How to Cultivate Your Talent

“A talent grows by being used, and withers if it is not used.”

read article

Thoreau on Living Through Loss
Thoreau on Living Through Loss

“Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident.”

read article

Saying the Ineffable: Poetry and the Language of Silence
Saying the Ineffable: Poetry and the Language of Silence

“The survival of poetry depends on the failure of language.”

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.)