![]() ![]() But I do find myself continually discovering, then returning to, certain core values. ![]() I had no idea that this eccentric personal record, which I began keeping in the city where Benjamin Franklin founded the first subscription library in America, would one day be included in the Library of Congress archive of “materials of historical importance.”īecause I believe that our becoming, like the synthesis of meaning itself, is an ongoing and dynamic process, I’ve been reluctant to stultify it and flatten its ongoing expansiveness in static opinions and fixed personal tenets of living. ![]() At the time, I had no idea that this small labor of love and learning would animate me with a sense of purpose and become both my life and my living, nor that its seven original readers would swell into several million. The site grew as I grew - an unfolding record of my intellectual, creative, and spiritual development. Halfway through my senior year of college, juggling my various jobs and academic course load, I took a night class to learn coding and turned the short weekly email into a sparse website, which I updated manually every Friday, then, eventually, every weekday. On October 23, 2006, Brain Pickings was born as a plain-text email to seven friends. What I was learning at night and on weekends, at the library and on the internet - from Plato to pop art - felt too uncontainably interesting to keep to myself, so I decided to begin sharing these private adventures with my colleagues at one of my jobs. As the reality fell short of that promise, I began keeping my own record of what I was reading and learning outside the classroom in mapping this academically unaddressed terra incognita of being.Īll the while, I was working numerous jobs to pay my way through school. With dad, year 0Īfter one such time-block, I left Bulgaria for America, lured by the liberal arts education promise of being taught how to live. In realizing that “a decade ago” I hadn’t existed - the self I now so vividly experienced daily was then a nonentity - I also realized that in several more of those ten-year blocks, my dad, and eventually I, will cease to exist. With unconcerned casualness, he replied: “About a decade ago.” I was astonished that people could segment their lives into blocks this big - my own life hadn’t yet lasted a decade. I was nine and my father was relaying an anecdote from his youth. I remember my first awareness of mortality as a child in Bulgaria. Here is the set from Year 16, and here is the renaming-rebirthing-reflection upon Brain Pickings becoming The Marginalian on its 15th birthday. NOTE: I add to these learnings with each year of life. ![]()
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