The Search for Meaning Cast in Clay: 19 Years of The Marginalian in 19 Ceramic Sentences
By Maria Popova
The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006 as a kind of field notebook on my expedition through the wilderness of life, searching for signposts. We live in a decimal world that loves the round anniversaries, the numbers that polish the perfect rim of zero. But to me, 19 is a much more meaningful number than 20.
I was 19 when I left Bulgaria, at that point the poorest country in Europe and the most biodiverse per square kilometer. I left by myself, with $800 my family had cobbled together, to begin a new life from scratch on another continent, in an unrecognizably different culture, amid ecosystems full of life-forms I had never seen, all on the promise that a liberal arts education would teach me how to live. Instead, I found myself in an industrial model of learning that trains the mind to be machine for excelling at standardized testing while sidestepping the spirit altogether. Working four jobs to pay for it, too exhausted and disoriented to make friends, I was lonely and lost and sank into a profound depression.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read, James Baldwin (of whom I had never heard) observed in looking back on his life.
And so I read.
I read Aristotle (whom my grandmother had quoted since I was a child) and Susan Sontag (of whom I had also never heard), discovered Maurice Sendak and Ruth Krauss (forging my conviction that great childrens books are philosophies for living in disguise), lost myself and found myself in Leaves of Grass.
My mind became itself in the margins of what I read. I began writing about it, then around it, then beyond, and that became The Marginalian.
To mark nineteen years of it, I have done something different from the usual annual inventory of life-learnings and combined two animating forces of my present life sentences and ceramics casting in clay thoughts I have had over the years that have stayed with me, truths I have learned the hard way and still habitually forget, still relearn afresh. Some of these sentences come from my published books, some from Marginalian essays, some from my bird divinations, some from the private pages of my journal. All of them are things I wish someone had told me at the outset of so-called adulthood.
Ceramics seemed a fitting medium the clay teaches so much about the art of holding on and letting go, the kiln teaches so much about the quantum of relationships. I experimented with various letterforms, from childrens rubber stamps to vintage letterpress type, until finally settling on a century-old brass alphabet for leather carving that seemed to make the clay the happiest.
Each bowl is different, each imperfect, each like life itself the work of time and love, of the intentional and the unpredictable, of chemistry and chance. None but one turned out exactly as intended.
While every human life makes its own singular meaning in the act of living, beneath it course the same core hopes and fears, the same shy yearnings and screaming passions we are all always learning the same lessons, in different guises and through different teachers.
To honor this kinship, I am giving the bowls away to you the readers who have made it possible for this labor of love to remain free, ad-free, AI-free, and fully human for nineteen years. As with the urns for living, I will let chance solve the disparity of scale so many people, so few bowls by raffling them off. To enter, make a donation in any amount that is right for you, but end it with the decimal .19, whether it is $1.19 or $1,000.19. (This will help me separate the urn raffle from the regular donations.) On November 23, those upon whom chance has smiled will receive a private note from me and we will turn the fragile atoms over to the postal service. (And if they dont survive, a lovely reminder that all sentences break.)
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