On Maria Popova's "The Marginalian"

An idea worth drawing for.

This visual essay is a tribute to Maria Popova. It’s part of an ongoing series called Ideas Worth Drawing For, in which I make hand-drawn images to honor the excellence of essayists I admire.

One of my favorite words is the Japanese term tsundoku. It refers to growing piles of unread books. I love it for giving me the vocabulary to describe a perpetual state in my home, one that brings me joy mixed with a dash of melancholy — the immense pleasure of possessing all those volumes of knowledge and stories, tinged with the sadness of recognizing that there can never be time enough to read them all.

I learned of tsundoku from Maria Popova's The Marginalian, a publication she calls her record of “reading and reckoning with our search for meaning: sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children's books, always through the lens of wonder.” Her writing holds consummate charm, such as her coinage of the phrase “cathedrals of understanding.” In a recent interview, Popova summarized the central question she grapples with:

How do we manufacture this feeling of meaning given we are the product of completely austere impersonal forces and we are transient and we will die and return our borrowed stardust to this cold universe that made it.

Popova’s answer is to read widely.

We’re not nearly as unique as we feel that we are from the inside of our own experience. [James] Baldwin actually had a wonderful line in one of his essays: “You think your pain and suffering are alone in the history of the world, and then you read.” And that’s been my experience. I find so much consolation and assurance and guidance in the lives of people who have lived before me…

The search for meaning demands that we sift through millennia of accumulated wisdom and perspectives, most of which is bound in books. In The Marginalian, Popova guides readers through her attempt at deciphering a throughline within this broad catalogue.

Learning the term tsundoku from Popova was fitting, because when I began reading The Marginalian like an addict about a decade ago, nearly every essay compelled me to buy whatever book she was discussing. She tends to write about older books that are available as used copies for a bargain, so these purchases were easy to justify.

My roommate at the time expressed concern at the endless stream of boxes ordered from second hand bookstores across the nation, and at the tsundoku invading our living room.

I don't remember why I stopped reading The Marginalian. But I do know why I hesitated to pick the habit up again: it was a bit frightening to revert back to that routine of ordering a couple used books nearly every day. This is no exaggeration of where my addiction had led me.

The Marginalian still arrives as a dispatch in my inbox, and recently, I dared to open an essay about “The Lost Words: An Illustrated Dictionary of Poetic Spells Reclaiming the Language of Nature.” Popova details why nature writer Robert Macfarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris created this children's book of poetry as an antidote to one of the great injustices of the 21st century:

In early 2015, when the 10,000-entry Oxford children’s dictionary dropped around fifty words related to nature — words like fern, willow, and starling — in favor of terms like broadband and cut and paste, some of the world’s most prominent authors composed an open letter of protest and alarm at this impoverishment of children’s vocabulary and its consequent diminishment of children’s belonging to and with the natural world.

Macfarlane elaborated:

The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.

This revelation made me blanch. They even took away dandelion, never mind that making wishes while blowing away dandelion fluff is as fundamental to childhood as being told to eat your vegetables or catching snowflakes on your tongue. The audacity.

A columnist at The Guardian attempted to justify the atrocity, not unlike tankies who try to defend the honor of Stalin and Mao:

But Oxford Dictionaries are absolutely correct in what they're doing, and the people moaning at them have got the whole situation completely backwards.

…

I’m a little bit queasy at the idea that somehow natural words are morally superior to technological one. Maybe ‘chatroom’, ‘blog’ and ‘cut-and-paste’ lack the poetic qualities of cowslips and otters, but they’re far more valuable to most people’s lives, and there’s nothing intrinsically ‘wrong’ about that fact.

The galling claim that broadband is “far more valuable” to children's lives than dandelion ignores how technological words frequently and quickly become obsolete. Chatroom was a thing in the age of AOL and dial-up modems. Conversely, even when flora and fauna go extinct, their relevance may remain or even grow. (See: Dinosaurs.)

To be clear, I say this as a great lover of science and technology. We should include better words from that genre, such as computer or spaceship. Such words are passing the test of time while fueling imagination and storytelling, unlike MP3 player, which refers to a technological antique that holds little romance. If a children's dictionary must have a word cap (must it?), then it would be acceptable to remove a nature word or two for technological words with lasting importance. The problem is not merely that replacing lovely words like willow with dull words like bullet-point is an affront to all that is good and decent, but also that the “updated” dictionary will become obsolete quicker than its previous edition.

Shamelessly, the apologist also argues:

The Oxford English Dictionary is a historical record, analyzing contemporary writing and parsing the results according to strict guidelines to provide its users with an accurate depiction of how language is used.

In the case of the Junior Dictionary, that work is carried out using a 100 million word corpus of children’s literature and writing. The editors aren’t just taking an adult dictionary and chucking out words; they’re performing a detailed and sophisticated analysis of the English language and recording the results as faithfully as possible.

…

Attacking a dictionary for removing these words is like punching your thermometer when it’s too cold, or shouting at journalists because you don’t like the news from Syria. They’re simply reflecting reality, and if that troubles you then maybe you should be out confronting these issues in the real world rather than in the pages of a book.

That line of defense at least helps us understand how the tragedy unfolded. Allegedly, at the time Oxford English Dictionary made these changes, contemporary writing for children used words like block-graph more than acorn. If true, this is a travesty unto itself.

But when the apologist snarkily tells the likes of Macfarlane (his primarily target) not to confront this issue in the pages of a book, he seems to miss his own point. By publishing words like newt and otter in a new children's book, does that not give the Oxford English Dictionary better data to analyze when it comes time to update its children's dictionary yet again? By confronting this issue in the pages of a book, Macfarlane does the only thing that can help rectify this injustice.

Vexed by the children’s dictionary fiasco, and weakened by my ill humor, I relapsed back to my old habit of impulse buying books that Popova recommends. I bought Macfarlane’s and Morris's “The Lost Words" for my daughter, who delights in plucking dandelions and collecting acorns. But this book, at least, we are reading together.

Popova clearly shares the book buying affliction her writing imposes on me and, I suspect, the vast majority of her readers. In her essay “Umberto Eco's Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones,” she insists that accumulating tsundoku is not a problem. Popova quotes Lebanese-American scholar, statistician, and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb writing about Umberto Eco in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which is another unread book on my shelf (original emphasis):

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Eco's History of Beauty has been in my tsundoku since I was a teenager, and I bought his The Book of Legendary Lands and The Three Astronauts on Popova's recommendation during that book buying binge she inspired a decade ago.

There is a famous Twilight Zone episode that explores the psychology of people who surround themselves with tsundoku. In “Time Enough at Last,” a bookworm discovers that he is the sole survivor of a nuclear apocalypse. Once he realizes that books from the library are also unscathed, his despair transforms into ecstasy. Finally, he can read without interruption, without anyone nagging at him to do anything else! He exclaims:

Collected works of Dickens! Collected works of George Bernard Shaw! Poems by Browning, Shelley, Keats! Great Dramas of the World! Books, books, all the books I'll need, all the books… all the books I'll ever want. Shelley, Shakespeare, Shaw… ooh, all the books I want! All the books, ahhh…

He assembles tsundoku around himself, books and rubble piled up together in the happiest of post-apocalyptic scenes. Giggling, he hugs a book with a richly marbled cover to his chest.

And the best thing, the very best thing of all is there's time now. There's all the time I need, and all the time I want. Time, time, time! Ahh, there's time enough at last.

Spotting another prize, he leans forward to pick it up. His thick, coke-bottle glasses fall from his face and shatter on the library steps. He moans:

That's not fair. That's not fair at all! There was time now. There was… was all the time I needed. It's not fair. It's not fair…

The camera zooms out on the sobbing man, clutching his shattered glasses and surrounded by piles of books that he can never read. This nightmare teases bookworms by imagining what it would be like to give us what we want in abundance -— time, time, time! — and then corrupting our wish like a monkey's paw.

Popova has another essay on how we grapple with longing for more time. In her piece about the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca's On the Shortness of Life, she shares his “poignant reminder of what we so deeply intuit yet so easily forget and chronically fail to put into practice”:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

Popova excels at introducing her readers to the most important ideas humanity has thought up, and she draws on a wealth of eclectic references to reiterate those ideas from many points of view. She pairs Seneca with Annie Dillard (“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”), Bertrand Russell (“What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?”), and also Kierkegaard, David Foster Wallace, Montaigne, and Alan Watts. This is why reading even one of her essays becomes a temptation to buy books from half a dozen intriguing authors.

If your tsundoku have grown into teetering towers that threaten to topple over and crush you beneath the weight of your antilibrary, then beware The Marginalian.