Maria Popova, writer of the Marginalian, a collection of dense, emotional, and inspiring writing, has a gift for touching the ineffable.
She has a sublime (in the original ‘fearsome awe’ sense) way of defining the improbability of you as the result of “the myriad chance events between the birth of the universe and this moment.”
And she reaches to amazing writers from all times to help explain what we are doing here, what it all means, and how to deal with it.
In the post linked below, she uses Blaise Pascal, the polymath who passed away at 39, to talk about life and death. And when talking about life and death, two themes of Popova’s that always show up are the eternity before and after our lives, and love.
love is simply how we survive the cosmic helplessness of being born ourselves. [Source: Why You – The Marginalian]
She has a way of talking about love that is so fragile and special, but also huge and enduring.
Go read the post. And her other works as well.
Image, from the post, is one of her bird divinations – all sublime poems inspired and with words from ornithological descriptions
