Maria Popova has found a way to bend time and space. There is no other way to explain the sheer volume of writing the editor of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) produces, itself the product of library-loads of reading. Popova simply must have stretched out a nook in the otherwise taut fabric of the universe and curled up within it to ingest the millions upon millions of words she has read on literature, philosophy, art, science, culture and basically every other subject under the sun, before moving to her Macbook Air to distil said millions upon millions of words into thoughts of her own.

For this is what The Marginalian is all about: pulling the best of her literary discoveries together in essays and reflections that blend seemingly disparate ideas and disciplines into cogent insights about life. (Lest you get the impression these are somehow ‘condensed summaries’, please understand: Popova publishes several essays a week, each ranging from 2,000-5,000 words. That’s roughly 30,000 words of ‘condensed’ wisdom a month!)

Point is, Popova may well be the first human being to have absorbed the world's knowledge and applied it to the art of living. Well, must be nice to be her. Alas, some of us are oppressively bound by the laws of physics. We have appointments to get to! Traffic to sit in! Tradies to wait for! “Still,” my editor says, “what if you could somehow cram it all in?”. I say, “What are you talking about! This isn’t digestible!” He says, “Yeah yeah, but what if you could mainline her essays, absorbing every ounce of wisdom she’s distilled? Would you emerge on the other side a deeper, more enlightened person?” He has wondered this thought, and now it is my assignment.

My quantum reading nook consists of about three spare hours and a laptop buried under a pile of washing at the kitchen table. I don’t have time for luxuries like “wisdom”! I barely have time for luxuries like “showers” or “tipping the microwave meal out of the plastic bowl into a real bowl”. There is only one way to MariaPopova myself, and it’s going to be in the most anti-MariaPopova way possible: speed reading like an asshole.

To prepare for this task, I watched a ten-minute-long Tim Ferriss video tutorial about ‘speed reading’. (At double speed, so it only took me five minutes.) Tim Ferriss wears a weird beanie and says to read a book faster you need to draw vertical margins indented from the sides of the pages, so your eyes track down the middle of the text and you “use your peripheral vision” to clock whatever is said at the start and end of each line. This seems more like letting your subconscious make educated guesses to me, but who am I to argue with the guy who got rich by saying you can do anything in four hours?

Maria’s writing is on the internet, so I’ve sticky-taped some string guides to my computer monitor and zoomed in to make sure half of whatever is on the screen is ruled outside the bounds of my attention. There’s still too much to take in. My inner Tim Ferriss is urging me to Get to the point! Summarise! Condense! Where to begin? How to summarise seventeen years of her website? Let’s start with her own attempt to do so—I navigate to her About page. Great. Here, Popova has listed her twenty-three favourite pieces, to give “a sense of scope and sensibility” of her output. Total word count: seventy-three thousand, seven hundred and five words. We are talking PhD-length content, but I am now qualified in rapid comprehension, so it’s fine. I open twenty-three tabs on my browser. I am scrolling like a madwoman. I am ingesting the universe. Call me Dr Popova.

First lesson: you need a lot more than three hours to ‘speed read’ the equivalent of a doctoral thesis. I had to skip two meals and one shower to get it all done—so yes, I emerged wiser... but also, hungry and dirty. Totally worth it, though! Here are the take-homes from my eye-straining, brain-draining, RSI-inducing word-hoovering marathon. Will they help you achieve enlightenment? Resolve your existential crises? Equip you to start a cult? Perhaps! They’ve certainly given me a migraine. It’s been a public service. You’re welcome.

1. To fear death is to die

(Well, it’s to not truly live.) Death is simply a reminder to live—there’d be no meaning to life if it never ended. No point worrying about it. Anxiety is the ‘portal’ through which people escape living in the moment, and therefore don’t live at all.

2. Love is illogical

You need to be very careful about who/what you love, because you inevitably become who/what you love. And yet you can’t actually control this, because of the “straitjacket of irrationality” that becloaks us when we fall in love. Even an “apostle of reason” (historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt) can get drunk on love and write “fiery love letters” (to her much-older, married professor, Martin Heidegger—he sent many back, and the pair remained lifelong friends for decades after their romance ended). BUT ALSO: Love is an act, independent of its object. When a lover dies or leaves you, you will still love, in the way that you love.

3. Having a chat is like two amoebas having sex

Human conversation is special. Other forms of communication are simply about transmitting information—in whatever medium—to a receiver, and then perhaps receiving a response. But human speech actively anticipates a response, meaning what is said is “shaped as it is spoken by actual or anticipated response”, making it “a continuous interchange between two consciousnesses”, according to science fiction author Ursula Le Guin. This, Le Guin argues, is like two amoebas having sex: “amoebas usually reproduce by just quietly going off in a corner and budding, dividing themselves into two amoebas; but sometimes conditions indicate that a little genetic swapping might improve the local crowd, and two of them get together, literally, and reach out to each other and meld their pseudopodia into a little tube or channel connecting them.” Talking and listening are the same thing, and are magic, like microscopic porn.

4. Humans need nature

We cannot and should not try to dominate nature. Everything in the universe is connected. Humans are not the centre—we are part. Science needs poets to help convey this fundamental truth. Wonder, humility and awe will save humanity from itself. Popova cites Rachel Carson’s iconic and hugely influential book Silent Spring (on the harmful environmental effects of pesticides) as a prime example of this: “Her lyrical writing rendered her not a mere translator of the natural world,” Popova writes, “but an alchemist transmuting the steel of science into the gold of wonder.” Scientists have the data—but they need the right words to make people care. The destruction of the natural world is morally corrosive to humans. We biologically need contact with nature—this is why gardening is so good for your mental health. Even symptoms of Alzheimer’s, Tourette’s and Parkinson’s diseases diminish in a garden. Nature is what remains once you’ve exhausted all human pursuits.

5. Time isn’t real

Unfortunately I don’t have time to fully unpack what this means. It was something about how only the ‘now’ is eternal because it’s not the past nor the future—it’s always ‘now’. So you should live in it (the ‘now’)! But also, time (again: not real) limits everything. Should we despair or rejoice about this? Neither. Console yourself with the knowledge that the memories of what we lose (people, places, things) due to (fake) time’s limits are the only true ‘forever’. Deep.

6. Trees are an excellent metaphor for life

We are all the Ship of Theseus (i.e. the boat which, over time, has all its individual parts replaced, but is still the same ship (or is it?)). We are ever-changing—yet still us. Everything is in an eternal cycle of growth and decay. Growth requires regeneration—the discarding of something to create something new from its matter. Leaves fall from branches, rot on the ground, become soil, and then rise again in another plant (sometimes as part of the same plant). This is consoling! Try to see any ‘loss’ instead as a transformation. Walking in a forest is a great way to remind yourself of this, thanks to its “ceaseless syncopation of generation and decomposition that composes the pulse-beat of total aliveness”.

7. Shut up and listen

Talking crowds out the space in your brain for thoughts. Be quiet, and let them emerge. (Does this include the tens of thousands of words my inner voice is reading aloud to my very-crowded-feeling brain right now? Maybe mind-talk doesn’t count. HOW CONVENIENT, POPOVA.)

8. There’s no blue in nature

We think of our planet as the ‘pale blue dot’ because of the blue sky and sea—but that all only appears blue because of the way light is absorbed and reflected. There is no naturally occurring true blue pigment. Any plant or animal that seems to be ‘blue’ is just performing “various tricks with chemistry and the physics of light, some having evolved astonishing triumphs of structural geometry to render themselves blue”. (There is no metaphorical value in this fact, it’s just good pub trivia.)

9. Something about Kepler

Full disclosure: This one was over 8000 words and hard to make sense of at the pace I was reading. Dude was a scientist who invented the word “orbit” and in 1608 wrote the first ever science fiction book (about a guy going to the moon) that made people call his mother a witch (she wasn’t a witch). My peripheral vision may have missed some key points.

10. Over-optimisation will make you miserable*

Stop trying to have the best possible outcome in every situation. There are too many crucial things in life that we can’t choose, so will never be optimal anyway: your parents, who you love, the era you are born in, your physical characteristics—they’re out of your hands. Accept the life you’ve been handed and live it. “You have to go the way your blood beats,” writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin believed. “If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.” In any case—happiness is a byproduct, not a goal: you will not be happy by trying to be happy. You will only be happy by doing your duty, and having meaning in your life, and that can only come through living with integrity and authenticity.

11. The meaning of life is not universal

It is unique to each individual, because the answer to the question ‘what does life demand of you?’ is different for everyone. Be wary of self-appointed self-help gurus.** Best quote on this comes from the Austrian neurologist, psychologist, philosopher and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl: “To ask about ‘the meaning of life’ in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, ‘And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?’ Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?”

12. Friendship is one of life’s great gifts

Friends bear witness to our existence. They are the antidote to loneliness. They are the tender reminder that we are all alone, but together we are less alone. “Tendrils of care” are what friendships are made of.***

13. Anxiety is pointless

The root of anxiety is worry or fear of bad things happening. But there is no point in worrying about bad things happening before they happen. If they do happen, you will suffer then. There is no need to suffer in the lead-up as well—this stops you from living. As the Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca said, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”. The Beatles, Buddha and the Stoics were right when they told us to ‘let it be’: resist the urge to characterise things in terms of gain or loss, positive or negative.

14. Nihilism is morally weak

Taking a wholly pessimistic or optimistic view of humanity is a cop-out. Don’t look at all the awful shit happening in the world and despair. The worst of humanity also shows us the best of humanity. Be optimistic but not naive—critical thinking shouldn’t lead to cynicism. Rational faith in humanity sees it as not all good, or bad.

15. Keep some goddam perspective you goose!

The human lifespan does not lend itself to perspective. Our view of the present moment is narcissistic, so step outside of it, widen “the pinhole of the present” and remember that history is cyclical. As Popova says, “We forget that our particular moment, with all its tribulations and triumphs, is not neatly islanded in the river of time but swept afloat by massive cultural currents that have raged long before it and will rage long after”.

16. ‘Evil never wins—it just doesn’t die’

At the height of WWII, writer John Steinbeck sent a letter to his best friend cautioning against hopelessness and proclaiming that “All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up”. I took this to mean that human awfulness is like the weeds in your garden: you can never fully eradicate them—you have to work to keep them at bay. But Popova’s summation of his message was more rousing: “...our human foibles don’t negate our goodness or our desire for betterment but, rather, provide both the fuel for it and the yardstick by which we measure our moral progress”.

17. Stories trump information

Stories have closure. This is what sets them apart from ‘“information’, which is by its nature partial, incomplete, fragmentary. Susan Sontag argues this is the ‘moral obligation’ of a writer: to tell stories, because stories will hold our attention and allow us to make moral judgments—not just about what is better, but what is more important. (This is the obligation for human beings, too—to read stories.) This “challenge of cultivating wisdom” is especially important in an age where commercial interests condition us to confuse information with meaning. Or as Popova puts it: “Why think about what constitutes a great work of art—how it moves you, what it says to your soul—when you can skim the twenty most expensive paintings in history on a site like Buzzfeed?”****

* Does this mean Tim Ferriss is miserable?

** Does this include Tim Ferriss?

*** Can Tim Ferriss teach me how to build a friendship in four hours?

**** Uh-oh.