By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
Bless hindsight for how it clarifies the confusions of time, for how precisely it plots the true highs and lows on the terrain map of life once the quakes of the moment have died down, for how dispassionately it reveals what was a fleeting enthusiasm and what a lifelong gift. It is good to have an annual hindsight ritual in one’s life and one’s work, the more so the more the two converge. Here are the twenty-five “best” Marginalian essays of 2025 — a composite measure of what you most loved reading and what I most loved writing, which never perfectly coincide. (Bless the otherness of minds.)
The Three Elements of the Good Life
Do Not Spare Yourself
An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days
How to Be a Lichen: Adaptive Strategies for the Vulnerabilities of Being Human from Nature’s Tiny Titans of Tenacity
A Defense of Joy
HOLD ON LET GO: Urns for Living and the Art of Trusting Time
How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself
The Coziest Place on the Moon: An Illustrated Fable about How to Live with Loneliness and What It Means to Love, Inspired by a Real NASA Discovery
Any Common Desolation
What a Weasel Knows: Annie Dillard on How to Live
How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo
The Stubborn Art of Turning Suffering into Strength: Václav Havel’s Extraordinary Letters from Prison
The Souls of Animals
How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship
Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning
By Contacts We Are Saved: The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Change, the Meaning of Faith, and the Courage of Heresy
Anima: One Woman’s Search for Meaning in the Footsteps of Bulgarian Mountain Shepherds
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s Most Famous Poem
Forgiveness
Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success
Little Free Library Divinations: Searching for the Meaning of Life in Discarded Books and Found Objects
Carl Jung on Creativity
The Search for Meaning Cast in Clay: 19 Years of The Marginalian in 19 Ceramic Sentences
How Not to Waste Your Life
Favorite Books of 2025
