#marginalian

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Neurocomic: A Graphic Novel About How the Brain Works – The Marginalian

[dk-thrive]

Are you optimistic about the future?

I am optimistic about my willingness to show up for it with the best I’ve got.

— Maria Popova, from "Maria Popova Answers the Orion Questionnaire" (Orion Magazine)

[binsofchaos]

Wilderness | Rockwell Kent

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Grace Paley on the Art of Growing Older

“The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.”

Paley writes:

My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.

They said, Really?

My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.

[…]

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.

[infinitemonkeytheory]

To the Young Who Want to Die: Roxane Gay Reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Lifeline of a Poem

“The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait.”

None of us choose the bodies or brains or neurochemistries we are born with, the time and place we are deposited into, the parents we are raised by, the culture we are cultured in. Any sense of choice we might have is already saturated with these chance inheritances and is therefore, as James Baldwin so astutely observed, part illusion and part vanity.

[binsofchaos]

We are Made of Music

Music — with all the mysterious power by which it “enters one’s ears and dives straight into one’s soul, one’s emotional center” — is made not of notes of sound but of atoms of time. And if music is made of time, and if time is the substance we ourselves are made of, then in some profound sense, we are made of music.

[binsofchaos]

The Universe In Verse | The Marginalian

[fleeting-fixations]

We may fancy that there might be a better universe, but we cannot conceive of a better, because our minds are the outcome of things as they are, and all our ideas of value are based upon the lessons we learn in this world. Burroughs from Marginalian