There are affinities that feel less like coincidence than recognition. For years Maria Popova, the Bulgarian-born, New York-based polymath behind The Marginalian, has returned again and again to the work of Nick Cave — not as fan service, but as a mind meeting another mind on the hardest questions: how to live with loss, how faith and creativity share a root, what humility and curiosity still make possible. Later this month, on the 23rd of October, that long conversation steps, in part, onto a stage.
Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York will host Constellating Wonder, an evening marking twenty years of The Marginalian — the publication that began in 2006 as a private email of marginalia sent to seven colleagues and grew, without staff or advertising, into one of the most beloved independent records of the search for meaning. Her first book Figuring, complex, exhausting, fascinating, was a major literary event.
Popova will gather friends from poetry, physics, music and performance to read from the books that have most touched her, each introduced by a reflection on the old questions: what we make of our suffering, why the world had to be beautiful, how we might see more clearly and love more purely. The format echoes her Universe in Verse; the tone is that of the essays themselves.
Among the constellation — Krista Tippett, Marie Howe, Diane Ackerman, James Gleick, Uma Thurman, Zoë Keating and others — is Nick Cave.
For Australian readers the name Nick Cave needs no introduction, and still deserves one. Cave is one of this country’s greatest and most beloved sons: the boy from Warracknabeal and Wangaratta who carried the ferocity of The Birthday Party and the later gravity of the Bad Seeds into a body of work that has become, for millions, a kind of secular scripture.
Through the Red Hand Files he has turned the old machinery of fame into something rarer – a public correspondence about grief, doubt, the usefulness of beauty, and the ordinary miracle of another day. The death of his son Arthur in 2015, and later of Jethro, did not end the work; it altered its temperature. What emerged was not consolation so much as accompaniment. His concerts, always major events, have become essentially shamanic in nature.
Popova has been one of the most exacting readers of that turn. In piece after piece she has drawn out Cave on the two pillars of a meaningful life – humility and curiosity – on the kinship of creativity and faith, on music as a place where vulnerability becomes a kind of freedom, and, most recently, on the task of integrating sorrow with the bright ongoingness of ordinary hours.
One Red Hand File Popova highlighted this year has Cave noting, on the anniversary of the worst day, that the sun is nevertheless out, a child is playing, the world is quietly moving forward: a sad day, and a beautiful one.
The best day. It is precisely the register The Marginalian has spent two decades defending — not the denial of pain, but the refusal to let pain become the whole of the story.
Their meeting is not new. They have appeared together in New York before; Cave has read Popova’s own writing aloud. What is new is the scale of the invitation.
Twenty years after that first email, Popova is marking the anniversary not with a monument to herself but with a night of other voices, offered on a pay-what-you-can basis, with free tickets for those who need them and a livestream for everyone else. A bookstore of the twenty books that have mattered most to her will sit beside the Amphitheatre.
The whole thing is, in its way, a Marginalian essay made temporal: wonder treated as a public good.
Australia has not always been quick to claim the full strangeness of its artists while they are still at work.
Cave’s international stature can obscure how thoroughly the early years – Melbourne rooms, provincial towns, a hunger that outran the available culture – still run through the songs. To see him named among Popova’s friends is a small corrective.
Two of the era’s most luminous creative intellects, already in long conversation, briefly share a bill. The rest of us get to listen.
Further Reading
Boy on Fire: The Mark Mordue Interview —
https://asenseofplacemagazine.com/boy-on-fire-the-mark-mordue-interview/
Maria Popova and Nick Cave: two of our era’s most luminous creative intellects —
Music, mystery, vulnerability —
https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/11/10/nick-cave-faith-hope-carnage-music/
How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life
https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/07/15/nick-cave-loss/
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