Celebrating 20 Years of The Marginalian and the Search for Meaning: Free Livestream This Friday

At the dawn of my twenties, lonely, destitute, and disoriented by the demands of making a new life in an alien world, I started keeping notes on my search for meaning while working four jobs to pay my way through college.

在我二十岁出头的时候，我感到孤独、贫困，并因在一个陌生的世界中开始新生活的要求而迷失方向，我开始记录我对意义的探索，同时打四份工作来支付我读大学的费用。

On October 23, 2006, I began sharing my discoveries — passages from books, links to neuroscience studies, reproductions of 16th-century Japanese woodcuts — in an office email to seven colleagues.

2006 年 10 月 23 日，我开始在给七位同事的办公室电子邮件中分享我的发现——书中的段落、神经科学研究的链接、16 世纪日本木刻的复制品。

They in turn began sharing it with friends, who began sharing it with friends.

他们又开始与朋友分享，朋友们也开始与朋友分享。

The fractal spread and, within a few years, the Library of Congress had included it in its permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials.

分形传播开来，几年之内，美国国会图书馆就将其纳入其具有文化价值的材料的永久数字档案中。

It changed shape (the essays grew longer, the questions deeper) and name ( Brain Pickings became The Marginalian ) but continued beating with the same heart, reckoning with the ongoing bewilderment of being alive — sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder, always offered freely: no advertising, no AI, not even an assistant, a thoroughly one-woman labor of love sustained by the love of strangers.

它改变了形式（文章变长了，问题更深了）和名字（《大脑采摘》变成了《边缘人》），但仍然以同样的心跳动，思考着活着的持续困惑——有时通过科学和哲学，有时通过诗歌和儿童读物，总是通过奇迹的镜头，总是免费提供：没有广告，没有人工智能，甚至没有助手，完全是一个女人的爱的劳动，由陌生人的爱维持。

To celebrate twenty years of it, I am inviting friends from various walks of life — poets and physicists, musicians and actors, artists and historians of science — to read fragments of the writings, poetry and prose, that have most touched me over the years as I introduce each with a short reflection on its resonance to the eternal questions we live with: what do we make of our suffering, why did the world have to be beautiful, how do we see more clearly and love more purely.

为了庆祝二十周年，我邀请来自各行各业的朋友——诗人和物理学家、音乐家和演员、艺术家和科学史学家——阅读这些年来最触动我的著作、诗歌和散文的片段，我在介绍每一篇文章时，都会简短地反思它们与我们生活中的永恒问题的共鸣：我们如何看待我们的苦难，为什么世界必须是美丽的，我们如何看得更清楚，爱更纯粹。

With the format of The Universe in Verse and the feeling-tone of my Marginalian essays, the evening will feature live appearances and special contributions across spacetime by a constellation of beloved humans who have made my own life more livable over the years, among them Debbie Millman, Joan As Police Woman, Krista Tippett, Marie Howe, Diane Ackerman, James Gleick, Natascha McElhone, Sophie Blackall, Stephon Alexander, Natalie Batalha, Willow Defebaugh, Wendy MacNaughton, Zoë Keating, Nick Cave, Paola Prestini with the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, and surprise guests.

凭借《诗句中的宇宙》的格式和我的边缘文章的情感基调，今晚将有一群亲爱的人们在时空中进行现场表演和特别贡献，这些年来，他们让我的生活变得更加宜居，其中包括黛比·米尔曼、琼·阿斯女警、克里斯塔·蒂皮特、玛丽·豪、黛安·阿克曼、詹姆斯·格莱克、娜塔莎·麦克艾霍恩、索菲·布莱考尔、斯蒂芬·亚历山大、娜塔莉巴塔利亚、威洛·德博、温迪·麦克诺顿、佐伊·基廷、尼克·凯夫、保拉·普雷斯蒂尼与纽约市青年合唱团以及惊喜嘉宾。

If you aren’t attending in atoms at breathtaking Saratoga Performing Arts Center — a state-of-the-art outdoor amphitheater in Upstate New York, surrounded by waterfalls and hot springs, awned by an old-growth forest in full autumnal glory — you can join us virtually via this free livestream:

如果您没有参加原子在令人惊叹的萨拉托加表演艺术中心 - 纽约州北部的一个最先进的户外圆形剧场，周围环绕着瀑布和温泉，被一片秋日辉煌的古老森林遮蔽 - 您可以通过这个免费直播虚拟地加入我们：

(And if you find it enriching your day, or your life, consider a donation to lend a helping hand with the heaping production costs.)

（如果您发现它丰富了您的一天或您的生活，请考虑捐款以帮助解决不断增加的生产成本。）