The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “letters”

Thoreau on Living Through Loss
Thoreau on Living Through Loss

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

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M.C. Escher on Creativity and Grasping the Largest Mystery Through the Immense Beauty of the Very Small
M.C. Escher on Creativity and Grasping the Largest Mystery Through the Immense Beauty of the Very Small

“What is that so-called reality; what is this theory other than a beautiful but primordially human illusion?”

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Dostoyevsky in Love
Dostoyevsky in Love

“I love her happiness more than my own.”

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Loneliness and the Trinity of Creativity: Ada Lovelace, the Poles of the Mind, and the Source of Her Imaginative Powers
Loneliness and the Trinity of Creativity: Ada Lovelace, the Poles of the Mind, and the Source of Her Imaginative Powers

“Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds… may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.”

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How to Bear Your Suffering: The Young Poet Anne Reeve Aldrich’s Extraordinary Letter to Emily Dickinson
How to Bear Your Suffering: The Young Poet Anne Reeve Aldrich’s Extraordinary Letter to Emily Dickinson

“It is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical, that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain.”

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Seneca on Creativity: Lessons from the Bees
Seneca on Creativity: Lessons from the Bees

How to ferment our natural gifts into nectar for the world.

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Beethoven and the Art of Amends
Beethoven and the Art of Amends

“When friends are at variance, it is always better to employ no mediator, but to communicate directly with each other.”

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Kahlil Gibran on How Storms Catalyze Creativity
Kahlil Gibran on How Storms Catalyze Creativity

“A storm always awakens whatever passion there is in me. I become eager, and seek relief in work.”

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The Unphotographable #5: Georgia O’Keeffe on the Grandeur of Machu Picchu and Peru’s Otherworldly Mountains
The Unphotographable #5: Georgia O’Keeffe on the Grandeur of Machu Picchu and Peru’s Otherworldly Mountains

Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.

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Control for Surrender: Henry Miller’s Stunning Letter to Anaïs Nin About the Value of and the Antidote to Despair
Control for Surrender: Henry Miller’s Stunning Letter to Anaïs Nin About the Value of and the Antidote to Despair

“When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.”

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