The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “culture”

Elie Wiesel on the Loneliness of Leadership, How Our Questions Unite Us, and How Our Answers Divide Us
Elie Wiesel on the Loneliness of Leadership, How Our Questions Unite Us, and How Our Answers Divide Us

“Could it be that questions are the remedy for solitude? After all, we have learned from history that people are united by questions. It is the answers that divide them.”

read article

Billy Collins’s Advice to Writers
Billy Collins’s Advice to Writers

“Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.”

read article

Anna Deavere Smith on How to Break the Paradox of Procrastination
Anna Deavere Smith on How to Break the Paradox of Procrastination

“If I swim a mile, the first half hour might be drudgery, but somewhere in the middle it catches fire.”

read article

A Laboratory for Feeling and Time: Pioneering Philosopher Susanne Langer on What Gives Music Its Power and How It Illuminates the Other Arts
A Laboratory for Feeling and Time: Pioneering Philosopher Susanne Langer on What Gives Music Its Power and How It Illuminates the Other Arts

“Music is ‘significant form,’ and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated sensuous object… Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.”

read article

Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Forgotten Treasure at the Intersection of Science and Poetry
Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Forgotten Treasure at the Intersection of Science and Poetry

An elegy for time and the mortality of beauty, composed with passionate patience and a sensuous cadence.

read article

Three Worlds: Composer Max Richter Brings Virginia Woolf’s Most Beloved Writing to Sonic Life
Three Worlds: Composer Max Richter Brings Virginia Woolf’s Most Beloved Writing to Sonic Life

A masterwork of immense originality and haunting splendor.

read article

Neuroscientist Christof Koch on How the “Qualia” of Our Experience Illuminate the Central Mystery of Consciousness
Neuroscientist Christof Koch on How the “Qualia” of Our Experience Illuminate the Central Mystery of Consciousness

“Without consciousness there is nothing… Consciousness is the central fact of your life.”

read article

The Doom and Glory of Knowing Who You Are: James Baldwin on the Empathic Rewards of Reading and What It Means to Be an Artist
The Doom and Glory of Knowing Who You Are: James Baldwin on the Empathic Rewards of Reading and What It Means to Be an Artist

“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.”

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

Power and Tenderness: Robert Penn Warren on Democracy, Art, and the Integrity of the Self
Power and Tenderness: Robert Penn Warren on Democracy, Art, and the Integrity of the Self

“[Art] is the process by which… a society comes to understand itself, and by understanding, discover its possibilities of growth.”

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.)