#the marginalian

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

* * * *

“You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

[…]

“I don’t mean it’s easy or assured; there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe — that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

[…]

“And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold — but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy — and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and the Amazons flowing. And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.”

—Mary Oliver, “Staying Alive”

h/t The Marginalian

[via Follies Of God]

[guy60660]

Violeta Lopiz | Marginalinian

[diana-andraste]

When you come home, darling, I shan’t have your letters, shall I, but I shall have yourself, which is more — Oh more, and better, than I can even think!

I sit here with my little whip, cracking the time away, till not an hour is left of it — then you are here! And Joy is here — joy now and forevermore!

Emily Dickinson, 1852 (excerpt)

Emily Dickinson's Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert

[solitude-and-books]

Kafka on friendship and the art of reconnection // Maria Popova

[memoriesofthingspast]

📐⚠️🟥🔵🔶💠

[sassafrasmoonshine]

Arthur Rackham (British, 1867-1939) • Illustration for The Wishing-Table by The Brothers Grimm • From the collection Little Brother & Little Sister and other Tales of the Brothers Grimm • Pen and ink with watercolour • 1917 • Publisher: Constable & Co. Ltd, London

Wishing-Table, Gold-Ass, and Cudgel: “Gold pieces fell down on the cloth like a thunder shower.”

A beautiful review of the collection Little Brother & Little Sister, written by Maria Popova can be read on her online magazine The Marginalian.

[arthistoryanimalia]

M.C. Escher on Loneliness, Creativity, and How Rachel Carson [born #OTD] Inspired His Art, with a Side of Bach:

The above article mentions that Rachel Carson owned two signed prints by M.C. Escher; it's been noted elsewhere that one was Fish and Frogs (1949), but does anyone know what the second one was?

[plutoismyfavplanet]

Love is a giver and a plunderer, the way it both anneals the self and alters it, the way it moors our wholeness and maps our incompleteness. At its heart is the ecstatic, disorienting recognition that our world is unfinished, that by entering the world of the other we broaden and magnify our own, that in the end there is no world — only a flowing exchange of energy, through which we become more entirely ourselves.

- maria popova

[mysweetobsessionwithwords]

“I do not (at least consciously) have a steady sense of life’s meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again. I can only re-achieve (or “remember”) it when I am “inspired” by things or events or people, when I get a sense of the immense intricacy and mystery, but also the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History…

I think “the meaning of life” is something we have to formulate for ourselves, we have to determine what has meaning for us… It clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.”

- Oliver Sacks

From The Marginalian by Maria Popova

[bolandoando]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Walter Benjamin]

+

“once upon a time” in other languages

korean: “back when tigers used to smoke” (호랑이 담배 피우던 시절에) [x]

czech: “beyond seven mountain ranges, beyond seven rivers” (za sedmero horami a sedmero řekami)

georgian: “there was, and there was not, there was…” (იყო და არა იყო რა, იყო…)

hausa: “a story, a story. let it go, let it come.” [x]

romanian: “there once was, (as never before)… because if there wasn’t, it wouldn’t have been to told” (A fost odată, ca niciodată că dacă n-ar fi fost, nu s-ar mai povesti…)

lithuanian: “beyond nine seas, beyond nine lagoons: (už devynių jūrų, už devynių marių)

catalan: “see it here that in that time in which beasts spoke and people were silent…” (vet aquí que en aquell temps que les bèsties parlaven i les persones callaven…) [x]

turkish: “Once there was, and once there wasn’t. In the long-distant days of yore, when haystacks winnowed sieves, when genies played jereed in the old bathhouse, [when] fleas were barbers, [when] camels were town criers, [and when] I softly rocked my baby grandmother to sleep in her creaking cradle, there was/lived, in an exotic land, far, far away, a/an…* (Bir varmış, bir yokmuş. Evvel zaman içinde, kalbur saman içinde, cinler cirit oynar iken eski hamam içinde, pireler berber [iken], develer tellal [iken], ben ninemin beşiğini tıngır mıngır sallar iken, uzak diyarların birinde…)

[guy60660]

Ben Shahn | The Marginalian

[amaised44]

[solitude-and-books]

illustration by margaret .c

- joseph brodsky

[memoriesofthingspast]

Alice James - genius

[thepetrichorist]

So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections—between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and a particular place, between the interior world of each pioneer and the mark they leave on the cave walls of culture, between faint figures who pass each other in the nocturne before the torchlight of a revolution lights the new day, with little more than a half-nod of kinship and a match to change hands.

– Maria Popova, Figuring