Maria Popova, who writes the long-running blog The Marginalian (formerly Brainpickings), discusses how to live wisely through reading, writing, and deep attention to the world. The conversation spans archives, diaries, poetry, science, the limits of language, the failure of modern education, the nature of the soul, and why AI can never make true art. Her central idea is that reading and writing are not about accumulating information but about metabolizing experience, finding meaning, and learning how to live.
Archives and the limits of the internet
The internet is only the surface layer of human thought; far more wisdom lives undigitized in university basements, libraries, and cultural institutions.
Example: The 92nd Street Y in New York hosted historic appearances by Pablo Neruda and Susan Sontag that exist only on physical reels in their basement.
Popova uses archives for serious research, seeking primary sources to accurately represent lives across time.
She spent seven years immersed in Mary Shelley’s journals and notebooks, and visited the Library of Congress for Walt Whitman’s papers.
The New York Public Library once ran an “After Hours” program where archivists brought out rare items like Copernicus’s book and Lewis Carroll’s diaries for public viewing.
Diaries as records of attention
Popova loves diaries that begin with observation of the external world and end with contemplation, modeled on Anaïs Nin’s approach.
She practiced this form during four months in Patagonia, finding it a rewarding conversation between mind and world.
Diaries are uniquely sincere because the performative mask comes off; they are written for oneself, not an audience.
Even published diaries are filtered through editing by heirs or estates, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Historical diaries older than 200 years are more reliable because publication was not the norm.
Diaries vs. memoir: Memoir originally meant others commemorating someone who had died (e.g., Emerson writing memoirs of Margaret Fuller). It is a composite of impressions, not a linear life history.
Letters and the craft of intimacy
Letters differ from diaries as a conversation with another person versus a conversation with oneself.
Some letters are performative (a persona speaks), while others are as openhearted as a journal.
Popova is drawn to letters that are both intimate and beautifully crafted, such as Virginia Woolf’s, which feel polished because her mind worked in complete, extraordinary sentences.
Presence over productivity
Popova values presence over productivity and has never planned an editorial calendar.
She keeps a 20-year log of ideas to write about, dipping in when time or interest allows.
Revisiting abandoned ideas years later brings new context and deeper understanding.
She walks four hours daily, using the time for silent incubation and combinatorial mental play, which she calls the “hyperlink of the mind.”
She says she has written almost everything on foot; the keyboard is just for transcription.
Language, poetry, and the limits of words
Language is a vessel for thought that shapes its contents: language tells thought how to move, and thought tells language how to bend.
The limits of language are the limits of our description of the world, not the limits of the world itself. The map is not the territory.
Popova was a latecomer to poetry, dismissing it until meeting Emily Levine, a comedian and philosopher of science, on a transatlantic flight.
Levine recited T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in a packed New York café, which disturbed Popova’s universe and opened her to poetry.
Levine sent her a poem a day during her final months, and they held “poetry retreats” in Northern California.
Poetry opens back doors of consciousness, giving shape to experience that the analytical mind cannot reach.
It moves us from looking to seeing, opening portals of sight we didn’t know we had.
William Blake’s line “As a man is, so he sees” captures this idea.
Popova ran a seven-year show called The Universe in Verse, pairing poetry with science (e.g., reading Patty Smith on dark matter).
Science meets reality on its own terms; poetry deepens the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other.
She rejects Keats’s accusation that Newton “unweaved the rainbow”; scientific understanding magnifies wonder.
Unselfing and the natural world
Iris Murdoch’s concept of “unselfing” describes encounters with art and nature that dissolve the self and absorb external reality into internal reality.
In Patagonia and the woods, Popova experiences herself as a creature among creatures, less interested in the stories of self.
Awe reduces the self to near-evaporation, allowing purity of perception and a sense of connection to something larger.
The failure of modern education and reading to survive
Popova started Brain Pickings in college because she felt betrayed by the promise of a liberal arts education.
She came from Bulgaria expecting to learn how to live but found a factory model of standardized testing and 400-person lectures.
She worked four jobs and kept a personal record of her own education through libraries, bookstores, and early internet browsing.
If given resources to design a liberal arts education, she would reject the factory model and immerse students in the world, reading, and contact with reality and prior lives.
She reads to survive: in her 20s, she devoured diaries and biographies for assurance that her pain was not unique, echoing James Baldwin’s line: “You think your pain and your suffering are alone in the history of the world, and then you read.”
The right book at the right moment is a relationship between reader, author, and time. Rereading the same book years later yields new meaning because the self is fluid.
Epiphanies versus incremental revelation
Popova does not believe in epiphanies as life-changing events; she believes in incremental revelation.
Epiphanies are glimpses that feel transformative in the moment but do not stick without slow integration.
The gap between recognizing a pattern and changing it is wide and slow; transformation requires work, not just insight.
On famous quotes
Oscar Wilde on artists ignoring the public: Popova is cynical; even Wilde’s aphorisms were made for an audience. She believes authentic creators can hold awareness of reception lightly and create despite it.
Tchaikovsky on showing up for work: He wrote to his patron defending his work ethic, arguing that a self-respecting artist cannot wait for the muse. Popova agrees that showing up opens the portal, and that one must accept mediocrity and inconsistency as part of any creative practice.
Why AI can never make art
Popova has no real experience with AI but is horrified by the idea of it replicating her work.
AI can produce information instantly but has no access to the feeling out of which something was created.
AI has not suffered and cannot collide with its own impossibility; without suffering, there is no true art.
Art comes from the restlessness to find meaning, beauty, and wonder in response to loneliness and pain.
AI can tell you about the eye of a scallop, but only days of lived research produce writing with feeling.
The soul and the self
Popova defines the soul as the fundamental unit of life, something beyond material that she cannot fully explain but believes is real.
Above the soul is the spirit; if the soul dies, the spirit dies, but one can be dispirited while the soul remains alive.
She is ambivalent about the soul: she believes the universe is knowable and rejects the idea that mystery is permanently beyond reach, yet she thinks the function of what we call soul is real.
Most people live at the level of the self—the costume of personality—rather than the soul, leading with identities and opinions that are mutable and unanchored.
On “content” and the state of the internet
Popova is allergic to the word “content” because it reduces creative work to material whose purpose is to carry advertising.
She has never had advertising on her site, a radical choice over 20 years.
The internet has moved toward clickbait and listicles, shallowing cultural material. She is moving away from it not on moral grounds but because she finds it uncompelling as a human being.
She writes about love because she has not figured it out; she considers loving each other better the great mystery and the purpose of being here.
