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"The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is," Iris Murdoch wrote in a 1970 masterpiece — a radical idea in her era and in her culture, counter to the notions of individualism and self-actualization so foundational to Western philosophy. Today, practices like metta meditation and mindfulness — practices anchored in the dissolution of the self, which remains the most challenging of human tasks even for the most devoted meditators among us, offering only transient glimpses of reality as it really is — flood the global mainstream, drawn from the groundwater of ancient Eastern philosophy and carried across the cultural gulf by a handful of pioneers in the 1960s and 1970s. Chief among them was the great Zen Master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022), who arrived in America in 1961 to study the history of Vietnamese Buddhism at the Princeton Theological Seminary, bringing what he learned back to his native Vietnam two years later and devoting himself to the project of peace, for which the South Vietnamese government punished him with a four-decade exile. Half a lifetime later — having been nominated by Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize, having founded the fount of civilizational optimism that is Plum Village in France, having survived a stroke that left him unable to speak or walk — he was finally allowed to return to his motherland, leaving the West that celebrated him as the father of mindfulness.  Thich Nhat Hanh. (Photograph courtesy of Plum Village.) The journal Thich Nhat Hanh began keeping upon his arrival in America as a young man was published half a century later as Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals 1962–1966 (public library). These remain his most intimate writings — a rare record of his unselfing, which made him himself: the monk who brought mindfulness to the world. In an extraordinary diary entry penned ten days before his thirty-sixth birthday — the age at which Walt Whitman opened his Leaves of Grass with the declamation "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person" — Thich Nhat Hanh contemplates the illusory and interdependent nature of the self as he faces his own multitudes, pitted in the universal inner conflict that comes with being a person in the world, a private cosmos in a public sphere:  It's funny how much our surroundings influence our emotions. Our joys and sorrows, likes and dislikes are colored by our environment so much that often we just let our surroundings dictate our course. We go along with "public" feelings until we no longer even know our own true aspirations. We become a stranger to ourselves, molded entirely by society… Sometimes I feel caught between two opposing selves — the "false self" imposed by society and what I would call my "true self." How often we confuse the two and assume society's mold to be our true self. Battles between our two selves rarely result in a peaceful reconciliation. Our mind becomes a battlefield on which the Five Aggregates — the form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness of our being — are strewn about like debris in a hurricane. Trees topple, branches snap, houses crash.
Two centuries after Coleridge considered the storm as a lens on the soul, and a century after Van Gogh extolled the clarifying force of storms in nature and human nature, Thich Nhat Hanh adds: These are our loneliest moments. Yet every time we survive such a storm, we grow a little. Without storms like these, I would not be who I am today. But I rarely hear such a storm coming until it is already upon me. It seems to appear without warning, as though treading silently on silk slippers. I know it must have been brewing a long time, simmering in my own thoughts and mental formations, but when such a frenzied hurricane strikes, nothing outside can help. I am battered and torn apart, and I am also saved.
 Art by Akiko Miyakoshi from The Storm In consonance with Alain de Botton's insight into the importance of breakdowns, he looks back on what the most formative storm of his life taught him: I saw that the entity I had taken to be "me" was really a fabrication. My true nature, I realized, was much more real, both uglier and more beautiful than I could have imagined.
In a recollection that makes my own bibliophiliac soul tremble with the tenderness of recognition, he goes on to detail what occasioned the storm of his unselfing — his version of the garden epiphany that revealed to Virginia Woolf her life's purpose: The feeling began shortly before eleven o'clock at night on October first. I was browsing on the eleventh floor of Butler Library. I knew the library was about to close, and I saw a book that concerned the area of my research. I slid it off the shelf and held it in my two hands. It was large and heavy. I read that it had been published in 1892, and it was donated to the Columbia Library the same year. On the back cover was a slip of paper that recorded the names of borrowers and the dates they took it out of the library. The first time it had been borrowed was in 1915, the second time was in 1932. I would be the third. Can you imagine? I was only the third borrower, on October 1, 1962. For seventy years, only two other people had stood in the same spot I now stood, pulled the book from the shelf, and decided to check it out. I was overcome with the wish to meet those two people. I don't know why, but I wanted to hug them. But they had vanished, and I, too, will soon disappear. Two points on the same straight line will never meet. I was able to encounter two people in space, but not in time.
Suddenly, all lines dissolved into a boundless field of awareness, without space or time or self: I feel as though I've lived a long time and have seen so much of life. I'm almost thirty-six, which is not young. But that night, while standing amidst the stacks at Butler Library, I saw that I am neither young nor old, existent nor nonexistent. My friends know I can be as playful and mischievous as a child. I love to kid around and enter fully into the game of life. I also know what it is to get angry. And I know the pleasure of being praised. I am often on the verge of tears or laughter. But beneath all of these emotions, what else is there? How can I touch it? If there isn't anything, why would I be so certain that there is? Still holding the book, I felt a glimmer of insight. I understood that I am empty of ideals, hopes, viewpoints, or allegiances. I have no promises to keep with others. In that moment, the sense of myself as an entity among other entities disappeared. I knew that this insight did not arise from disappointment, despair, fear, desire, or ignorance. A veil silently lifted effortlessly. That is all. If you beat me, stone me, or even shoot me, everything that is considered to be "me" will disintegrate. Then, what is actually there will reveal itself — faint as smoke, elusive as emptiness, and yet neither smoke nor emptiness, ugly, nor not ugly, beautiful, yet not beautiful. It is like a shadow on a screen.
 London's Holland House library, home to thousands of historic and rare books, destroyed after the 1940 blitz. (Available as a print.) But from this feeling of losing the self, from this utter demolition of identity, arose a deep sense of having arrived at himself, at an elemental oneness of his being with all being: At that moment, I had the deep feeling that I had returned. My clothes, my shoes, even the essence of my being had vanished, and I was carefree as a grasshopper pausing on a blade of grass… When a grasshopper sits on a blade of grass, he has no thought of separation, resistance, or blame… The green grasshopper blends completely with the green grass… It neither retreats nor beckons. It knows nothing of philosophy or ideals. It is simply grateful for its ordinary life. Dash across the meadow, my dear friend, and greet yesterday's child. When you can't see me, you yourself will return. Even when your heart is filled with despair, you will find the same grasshopper on the same blade of grass… Some life dilemmas cannot be solved by study or rational thought. We just live with them, struggle with them, and become one with them… To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.
 Thich Nhat Hanh in the south-west of France during his exile, 1980s. (Photograph courtesy of Plum Village.) Complement this fragment of Fragrant Palm Leaves — a superb read in its totality — with the poetic physician Lewis Thomas, writing in the same era, on how a sea slug and a jellyfish illuminate the permeable boundary of the self, then revisit Thich Nhat Hanh on the art of deep listening, the four Buddhist mantras of turning fear into love, and his timelessly transformative teachings on love as the art of "interbeing." donating=lovingIn 2021, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) going. For fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |  | |  |
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Epochs before modern neuroscience came to locate the crucible of consciousness in the body, centuries before William James proffered his pioneering theory of how our bodies affect our emotions, Robert Burton (February 8, 1577–January 25, 1640) took up these questions in his 1621 tome The Anatomy of Melancholy (public library | public domain), observing that "there is almost no part of the body, which being distempered, doth not cause this malady." An impressive florilegium nearing a thousand pages strewn with a progenitor of hypertext, the book weaves together a cornucopia of quotations from earlier writers, from Seneca to Solomon, to illustrate Burton's central points — many radical then, some radical still — about a subject he examines "philosophically, medicinally, historically, opened and cut up"; a subject of which he had an early and intimate experience. "That which others hear or read of," he wrote, "I felt and practised myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing."  Robert Burton by Gilbert Jackson, 1635. Burton was only a teenager when he was plunged into his first episode of debilitating depression — a term that did not yet exist in the modern sense, because mental health did not yet exist as a clinical concept. This "melancholy," which often left him with "a heavy heart and an ugly head," was so disabling that it took him more than a decade to complete his studies at Oxford. He kept trying to leave the university and start an independent life, but never quite managed, lamenting his "hopes frustrated" and feeling "left behind, as a Dolphin on shore." Eventually — centuries before psychologists demonstrated that revising our inner narrative about a situation is the only way to improve our experience of that situation — Burton reoriented to his circumstance, coming to feel that his "monastick life" protected him "from those tumults & troubles of the world." Out of this conflicted isolation, he composed The Anatomy of Melancholy, subtitled What it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptomes, prognostickes, & severall cures of it." It went on to touch lives as varied as Samuel Johnson, Jorge Luis Borges, and Nick Cave. Keats — whose brief and light-giving life was punctuated by periodic onslaughts of darkness — declared it his favorite book. Like Whitman did with his Leaves of Grass, Burton kept obsessively revising and expanding his magnum opus, publishing five more editions by the end of his life — no small triumph for a book in the first century since the Printing Revolution, or a book in any era, especially one nearly a thousand pages long.  Frontispiece of the second edition, 1626. Burton inhabited the golden age of Renaissance anatomy, when Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings peered into the distant future of medicine. But medicine then was still as crude as a stone blade directed at the body, to the total Cartesian exclusion of the mind. Psychology was not even a faint contour in humanity's imagination. The birth of neuroscience was still three and a half centuries away. That Burton applied a term of physiology to the understanding of a psychology not yet born is already a staggering leap of the imagination. But even as a progressive of his era, he was also — like every visionary — a product of his era. (Which is alright — as I often say, even the farthest seers can't bend their gaze beyond their era's horizon of understanding; to expect of them otherwise is ahistorical hubris and an act of cruelty toward the limits of their time and place, which they chose no more than we have chosen ours.) Burton endorsed the humoral theory of the human body, navigated life-decisions by astrological calculations, earnestly believed in a physiological basis for men's intellectual superiority, celebrated barbarisms like hunting and hawking as spiritually worthy recreations, and excluded women from all recreations of the mind, relegating them to "curious needleworks," the making and showing off of "confections, conserves, distillations, &c.," and the tending to "sweet-smelling flowers" in the garden. And yet, through his convoluted Old English and his epochal blind spots, there shines a bright and clear light of understanding — a beam stretching backward and forward in time, to the dawn of our species and to the far future of our science, illuminating what it means to be human and what we can do to magnify the light of our humanity even in our darkest hours.  Jacob's Dream by William Blake, 1805. (Available as a print, as stationery cards, and as a face mask.) This, indeed, is a word Burton cherishes: Epochs before I borrowed the lovely phrase Patti Smith borrowed from William Blake in living the life-resolution to seek out what magnifies your spirit, magnify is the word Burton uses over and over for the activities he most recommends as salves for depression — he writes of how reading, walking, and art "much magnify" the person who partakes of them; four centuries before neurologist Oliver Sacks reflected on forty years of medical practice to point to gardens as one of the two things that have most helped his patients heal, Burton writes of a royal garden that "highly magnifies" the visitor's spirit. This is the essence of his insight — the way our physiological experience and our psychological experience can magnify each other. He writes: To that great inconvenience, which comes on the one side by immoderate and unseasonable exercise, too much solitariness and idleness on the other, must be opposed as an antidote, a moderate and seasonable use of it… both of body and mind… conducing to… the general preservation of our health.
Perched in time between the dawn of medicine with Galen and Hippocrates, and holistic healthcare as we now know it, Burton distills what those before him prescribed for good health. He observes that of the "labours, exercises, and recreations" most commonly recommended, "some properly belong to the body, some to the mind, some more easy, some hard, some with delight, some without, some within doors, some natural, some are artificial." He then goes on to make his own recommendation for the activities most potent as antidotes to melancholy. Alongside running and dancing, country sports and city gymnastics, he devotes an especially lovely passage to the one bodily activity most beloved by fertile minds.  Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase's vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.) Precisely a quarter millennium before Thomas Bernhard observed that "there is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking," and two centuries before Nietzsche extolled the mental benefits of walking, Burton writes: To walk amongst orchards, gardens, bowers, mounts, and arbours, artificial wildernesses, green thickets, arches, groves, lawns, rivulets, fountains… brooks, pools, fishponds, between wood and water, in a fair meadow, by a river side… in some pleasant plain, park, run up a steep hill sometimes, or sit in a shady seat… [is] a delectable recreation.
Noting that such recreations can uniquely "refresh and give content to a melancholy dull spirit," and that they are universally and readily available to just about anyone anywhere, he adds: Every palace, every city almost hath its peculiar walks, cloisters, terraces, groves, theatres, pageants, games, and several recreations; every country, some professed gymnics to exhilarate their minds, and exercise their bodies.
 One of artist Margaret C. Cook's illustrations for a rare 1913 English edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.) From the exercise of the body, Burton turns to the exercise of the mind, evaluating various contenders for the perfect antidote to melancholy. There is chess, "invented (some say) by the general of an army in a famine, to keep soldiers from mutiny" — an activity he considers "good and witty exercise of the mind," sure to allay melancholy in those who are "idle, and have extravagant impertinent thoughts, or troubled with cares, nothing better to distract their mind, and alter their meditations." But he hastens to caution that chess "may do more harm than good" if you become too invested in its mastery — then, chess can become "too full of anxiety" and turn into "a testy choleric game" causing grave distress to the brittle ego of the loser who is already in low spirits.  The Red King and Red Queen as chess pieces. One of John Tenniel's illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) Then there are acts of charity and philanthropy, "which are harmless jests, and have their good uses," but people often perform them "to exhilarate themselves and others" — acts often used to prop the doer's own ego, with little long-term circumstances of those upon whom they are bestowed. (Here too Burton is far ahead of his time, presaging our still dawning understanding of the paradoxes of aid in notions like "effective altruism" and "impact investing.") With this, he arrives at his most confident prescription. Centuries before T.H. White dreamt up the adventures of King Arthur's court and put into the mouth of his Merlyn the mightiest consolation for sorrow , Burton offers: Amongst those exercises, or recreations of the mind within doors, there is none so general, so aptly to be applied to all sorts of men, so fit and proper to expel idleness and melancholy, as that of study… Who is he that is now wholly overcome with idleness, or otherwise involved in a labyrinth of worldly cares, troubles and discontents, that will not be much lightened in his mind by reading of some enticing story, true or feigned, [or] observe what our forefathers have done, the beginnings, ruins, falls, periods of commonwealths, private men's actions displayed to the life, &c… Who is not earnestly affected with a passionate speech, well penned, an elegant poem, or some pleasant bewitching discourse?… To most kind of men it is an extraordinary delight to study. For what a world of books offers itself, in all subjects, arts, and sciences, to the sweet content and capacity of the reader? In arithmetic, geometry, perspective, optics, astronomy, architecture, sculpture, painting… in mechanics and their mysteries, military matters, navigation, riding of horses, fencing, swimming, gardening, planting… in music, metaphysics, natural and moral philosophy, philology, in policy, heraldry, genealogy, chronology… What so sure, what so pleasant? […] Whosoever he is therefore that is overrun with solitariness, or carried away with pleasing melancholy and vain conceits, and for want of employment knows not how to spend his time, or crucified with worldly care, I can prescribe him no better remedy than this of study, to compose himself to the learning of some art or science.
 Art by Cindy Derby from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. (Available as a print, benefitting the New York public library system.) With the sensitive disclaimer that overabsorption in the life of the mind can itself become a source of melancholy, he adds: Study is only prescribed to those that are otherwise idle, troubled in mind, or carried headlong with vain thoughts and imaginations, to distract their cogitations… and divert their continual meditations another way. Nothing in this case better than study… As meat is to the body, such is reading to the soul.
In a passage that especially gladdens my astronomically enraptured soul, Burton celebrates one particular region of curative curiosity: In all nature what is there so stupendous as to examine and calculate the motion of the planets, their magnitudes, apogees, perigees, eccentricities, how far distant from the earth, the bigness, thickness, compass of the firmament, each star, with their diameters and circumference, apparent area, superficies, by those curious helps of glasses, astrolabes, sextants, quadrants… arithmetic, geometry, and such like arts and instruments?
 Total eclipse of the sun by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. (Available as a print, as stationery cards, and as a face mask.) Burton returns to the necessary balance of bodily and mental exercise in lifting the grey gauze of melancholy: Body and mind must be exercised, not one, but both, and that in a mediocrity; otherwise it will cause a great inconvenience. If the body be overtired, it tires the mind. The mind oppresseth the body, as with students it oftentimes falls out, who (as Plutarch observes) have no care of the body.
Complement these fragments from the monolith of time and thought that is Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy — which goes on to offer remedies for insomnia, apathy, and other manifestations of the eternal malady — with a modern florilegium of great writers on the mightiest remedy for depression, then revisit Walt Whitman's workout and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on how the feeling-tone of the body scores the symphony of the mind. 
Virginia Frances Sterrett (1900–1931) had barely learned to walk when she began drawing. She never stopped, and her talent never ceased winning over its legion of silent champions. At fourteen, unthoughtful of achievement and ambition, friends persuaded her to send her drawings to the Kansas State Fair. To her surprise, she won first prize in three different categories. The originality of her drawings — which, throughout her life, came to her as visions she felt she was merely channeling onto the page with her pen and brush — captivated two successful local artists, who encouraged her to pursue formal study. The unexpected assurance opened up that subtle valve of self-permission that allows a gifted young person to consider — against the tide of their cultural and biological inheritance — the possibility of making a life in art.  Available as a print and stationery cards. Within a year, she won a stipend to the Art Institute of Chicago — one of the country's oldest, most esteemed and egalitarian art schools — and moved back to her hometown, which the family had left for Missouri, then Kansas, searching for livelihood after the father's death when Virginia was still a toddler. But she was only two months into her second year at the art academy when her mother grew ill. Now, it fell on Virginia to support her sisters and her only living parent by her art. She dropped out of school and took a series of jobs at various Chicago advertising agencies, earning $10 a week and grateful to earn it, but finding the work — endless drawings of pots, pans, beds, and travel bags — soul-syphoning.  Available as a print. Then, once again, a friend — another silent champion with more passionate confidence in Virginia's talent than she herself had — took some of her drawings to Chicago's annual book fair. But before any portal of opportunity had opened, she too fell ill. At nineteen, Virginia was diagnosed with tuberculosis — the infectious disease that killed one of every seven humans born between the dawn of our species and the dawn of the century in which Virginia was conceived, the crescendo of the epidemic aptly called consumption for the slow, unrelenting way in which it syphons the vitality of its victims.  Available as a print and stationery cards. She entered a sanatorium and went on drawing in the tiny pockets of energy she had each day. Imagine how it must have buoyed her bedridden spirits to receive a letter from a large Philadelphia publishing company nearly a year after one of their representatives had fallen under the spell of her drawings at the Chicago book fair. So it is that Virginia Frances Sterrett — nineteen, bedridden, impecunious — was commissioned to illustrate an American edition of Old French Fairy Tales (public library | public domain) by the nineteenth-century Russian-French writer Sophie Rostopchine, Countess of Ségur, who began her literary career in the lap of privilege when she was nearly sixty.  Available as a print. Virginia received $750 — more than $12,000 a century of inflation later — for the cover art, eight watercolors, cover art, sixteen pen-and-ink drawings, and endpaper illustrations — staggering solvency for a teenager in any epoch, especially hers, when even grown women rarely earned this much in any professional field, especially art. For this particular head-of-household teenage artist, it was nothing less than a lifeline that sustained her family for seasons. It was also a lifeline for the creative spirit that had been languishing as a handmaiden of consumerism in the vacuous world of commodity illustrations. Fairy tales were a natural fit for the fantastical imagination of the young artist. Since her earliest childhood, she seemed to dwell partway between the real world, with its disproportionate share of losses and hardships, and some otherworldly wonderland of levity and light — a wonderland Virginia could now bring to life for the world.  Available as a print and stationery cards. She especially loved that the publisher let her choose the passages most invigorating to her imagination and illustrate them in any way she was inspired to — which she did in a style reminiscent of Kay Nielsen's Scandinavian fairy tale illustrations released several years earlier, yet distinctly her own, attesting to Nick Cave's astute insight into influence and the paradox of originality.  Available as a print and stationery cards. After the book was published in 1920, the publisher was so pleased that they immediately commissioned her to illustrate an edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales, published in 1921, followed by another commission for an adaptation of Arabian Nights, edited by Hawthorne's granddaughter. But despite fourteen months at the sanatorium — the same amount of time she had spent in art school — Virginia's health continued to deteriorate. Hoping that a brighter, warmer climate might improve it, the small clan of women moved to Southern California and made a modest home in a bungalow covered with roses in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, where Virginia kept working on her Arabian Night drawings.  Available as a print. Her talent enchanted the local community. Word of her fairy-tale illustrations got around. She created a series of stage set drawings for the Hollywood Community Theater's production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. An established local artist and art educator ten years her senior organized an exhibition of Virginia's drawings at her studio gallery. A journalist for the local paper visited the young artist in her bungalow was impressed to find this teenage girl, born in the first year of what has been called "The Century of the Self," full of "gracious simplicity of manner and a sweet modesty that seemed quite amazing in this day of sophistication and self-centeredness." (What the journalist would have made of our present Century of the Selfie is a self-evident tragicomedy, the only appropriate calibration of which is James Baldwin's timeless remark about Shakespeare's time.)  Available as a print and stationery cards. Still, the California climate failed to halt the invasion of the deadly bacterium. Against the backdrop of her buoyant art, her young body wasted away in grim contrast. She left the rose-enveloped bungalow and entered a local sanatorium. Sixteen months later — an eternity for any young person, but especially one of such creative vitality — she was discharged as cured. After years of work through diminishing energies, her Arabian Nights was published in 1928. Local collectors immediately acquired the original drawings. Within a year, her art was lauded in the Los Angeles Times as technically brilliant and uncommonly imaginative, and exhibited in the Los Angeles Museum.  Available as a print. Thrilled by the landscape paintings of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French masters, Virginia dreamt of traveling to Europe to continue her interrupted art education. But France remained a landscape of the imagination, visited only on the drawing table of her fairy-tale illustrations. Virginia Frances Sterrett died on June 8, 1931, of tuberculosis — a disease without cure until the development of the antibiotic streptomycin fifteen years later. She was thirty.  Available as a print and stationery cards. Upon her death, Missouri — where she had spent the formative years of early childhood after her father's death — mourned a local hero of creative power. In a rueful remembrance published on the cover of the Sunday Magazine under the heading "The Girl Who Escaped from Life in Her Art," alongside five large black-and-white reproductions of her drawings, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch made the bittersweet observation that although Virginia's life had been a "struggle against poverty and disease," spent in "prosaic places of the West and Middle West," largely unrecognized beyond a small circle of admirers, in her short time she "left a record of achievement which most of those who live long and actively and receive public acclaim rarely achieve." That achievement, the anonymous and admiring journalist wrote, was "beauty, a delicate, fantastic beauty, created with brush and pencil… pictures of haunting loveliness." Two weeks after her death, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle — which had given the young Whitman his literary start nearly a century earlier, and which remained attentive to marginalized artists of uncommon talent — elegized plainly: "Her work was a delight to children and their elders, and it will be missed."  Available as a print and stationery cards. A century hence, Virginia Frances Sterrett's art continues to haunt with its delicate delight and its solemn tenderness, continues to cast its enchantment, continues to rise from page and screen as an inviting escape ladder into a lovelier world available to the imagination of any person in any reality. Complement it with the story of artist Aubrey Beardsley — also a visionary of his era, also taken by tuberculosis at an even younger age — and his stunning illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salome, then revisit Dorothy Lathrop's haunting fairy-poem dreamscapes, painted while Virginia was painting her French fairy tales. donating=lovingIn 2021, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) going. For fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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EXOLOVE OF THE WEEK Each week, I share something I encountered elsewhere online (or off) that filled my heart with gladness and delight — may it fill yours, too. How Venus Went to Hell /cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70215609/688_Venus.0.jpeg)
An especially thrilling episode of the reliably excellent Unexplainable podcast, about what happened to our sister planet and what it might tell us about our possible future. A SMALL, DELIGHTFUL SIDE PROJECT | |
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