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Love, Music, Solitude, and How to Be More Alive: The Best of The Marginalian...
From Emily Dickinson to Bruce Springsteen, by way of galaxies and gardening. It is an annual tradition to look back on the year’s readings and sieve the most nourishing — a tradition all the more vital...
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The Neurophysiology of Enchantment: How Music Casts Its Spell on Us
“Music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible.” “Music,” the trailblazing composer Julia Perry wrote, “has a unifying effect on the peoples of...
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The Symphony of Belonging: Alfred Kazin on Music as Spiritual Homecoming
On the emotional machinery that suspends us between rapture and tears. “A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote, “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it,...
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Nick Cave on the Art of Growing Older
“We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around.” “The perilous time for the most...
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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. In the pre-scientific world, in the blind old world with its old language, we had a word for those people most awake to the...
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The Life of Trees: A Poem
“I want to sleep and dream the life of trees, beings from the muted world…” We see ourselves in them. We lean on them for lessons on how to be more human and what resilience means. They are our...
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How to Grow Up: Nick Cave’s Life-Advice to a 13-Year-Old
“Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world… Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.” “Make your interests...
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Let Your Heart Be Broken
“The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering… The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.” We spend our lives trying to anchor our transience in some illusion of permanence and stability. We...
View ArticleBeethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Brought to Life in a Spanish Flashmob of 100 Musicians
A touchingly human reminder of our capacity for ecstasy, transcendence, and collective felicity. Imagine what life would be like if lived, in May Sarton’s lovely phrase, with “joy instead of will.”...
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A Shelter in Time: John Berger on the Power of Music
“Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.” “A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it...
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The Ant, the Grasshopper, and the Antidote to the Cult of More: A Lovely...
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter. In his splendid short poem about the secret of happiness, Kurt...
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How to Befriend Time: The Gospel of Pete Seeger and Nina Simone
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” “Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “it is the living moment that...
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The Importance of Trusting Yourself: Nick Cave on the Relationship Between...
“There is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things.” “Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not...
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The Work of Wonder: Phillip Glass on Art, Science, and the Most Important...
Epoch after epoch, we humans have tried to raise ourselves above other animals with distinctions that have turned out false — consciousness is not ours alone, nor is grief, nor is play. If there is...
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The Majesty and Mystery of Night Migration, in a Stunning Poem Turned to Music
“Night, when words fade and things come alive,” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his love letter to the hours of darkness, composed while flying alone over the Sahara Desert. No...
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Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life
“Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.” We are each born with a wilderness of possibility within us. Who we become...
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Nothing: The Illustrated Story of How John Cage Revolutionized Music and the...
“We make our lives by what we love.” “After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music,” Aldous Huxley wrote. Silence is greater than music because it is its central...
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Let the Last Thing Be Song
“When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.” A person is a note in the mouth of probability hungry for song, reverberating with echoes of the impossible. To exist at all is as close as this...
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Your Voice Is a Garden: Margaret Watts Hughes’s Wondrous Victorian Sound...
“I hear bravuras of birds… I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,” Walt Whitman exulted in his ode to the “puzzle of puzzles” we call Being. How puzzling indeed, and how miraculous,...
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The Paradox of Joy, with a Nick Cave Song and a Lisel Mueller Poem
In this world heavy with robust reasons for despair, joy is a stubborn courage we must not surrender, a fulcrum of personal power we must not yield to cynicism, blame, or any other costume of...
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