Saved by Charles Harris and
The Marginalian
Our friends — how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not.
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
Love the idea that NOT being seen, fully, is a blessing somehow; our mystery is to be cherished as THE mystery is cherished
We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be... See more
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
Virginia Woolf; to love slant; NOT being known is a blessing
That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you — is all an illusion.
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
Virginia Woolf; the perils of being known “too much”; tell it slant; love sideways and blurry to keep love growing
Such a “glimmering perception” of nature’s interdependence, Humboldt observes, was always present in so-called “primitive” societies as kind of shadow form, intuited rather than investigated, until science emerged to illuminate its elemental truth through its process of “long and laborious observation.”
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
Science can, and does, get there eventually. It is just that the process is slow and laborious, and along the way dogmas can get stuck, and some people forget that that is all part of the process. But, that is all part of the process.
we are now doing to human nature what we have already done to nature, turning a biodiverse wilderness into a monoculture of a single crop deemed correct, forgetting there are infinitely many valid ways of being alive, that they can and must be complementary rather than contradictory if the ecosystem is to thrive.
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
Peter Gabriel is right, if you hear the world as music, you can sing along with it, join in with it, celebrate and dance with it even while never knowing precisely what is going on.
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
Perhaps this is because music trades in mystery, while conversation trades in opinion — that subterranean species of certainty.
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
Rising from the pages is a prayer for abundance against the backdrop of all that is taken away, an insistence on the possibility of finding beauty amid the ruins of our hopes.
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
We walk the world to discover it and in the process discover ourselves.