THE MARGINALIAN - PAEAN TO LOVE AND WONDER

THE MARGINALIAN - PAEAN TO LOVE AND WONDER

There is a wealth of wonder on the Internet—hours are lost journeying through endless oceans of information—but there is nothing online nearly as fortifying, generous, and acutely smart as Maria Povopa’s gargantuan paean to love and wonder, The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings.) Read last week’s utterly beautiful essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tender love for his daughter, Una. It is such a wise and beautifully rendered piece of writing about fatherhood as a crucial act of survival. Just wonderful! Thank you Maria! You are an inspiration to us all, oh, and everyone, enlarge your life! Subscribe to The Marginalian! Love, Susie x

 

Nathanial Hawthorne on Una, his daughter five weeks after her fifth birthday—

‘Her beauty is the most flitting, transitory, most uncertain and unaccountable affair, that ever had a real existence; it beams out when nobody expects it; it has mysteriously passed away when you think yourself sure of it. If you glance sideways at her, you perhaps think it is illuminating her face, but, turning full round to enjoy it, it is gone again. When really visible, it is rare and precious as the vision of an angel. It is a transfiguration, — a grace, delicacy, or ethereal fineness, — which at once, in my secret soul, makes me give up all severe opinions that I may have begun to form about her. It is but fair to conclude that on these occasions we see her real soul. When she seems less lovely, we merely see something external. But, in truth, one manifestation belongs to her as much as another; for, before the establishment of principles, what is character but the series and succession of moods?’

From The Marginalian