themarginalian.org · 1 day ago

Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life – the Marginalian

When a young person wrote to Nick Cave seeking direction in a world that felt "bizarre and temporary," he responded not with reassurance that things would improve, but with something more honest: a reminder that the world has always been this way, "mystifying and forever in a state of flux," and that the task is learning how to move through it with grace. Writing through Maria Popova's lens at The Marginalian, Cave names humility and curiosity as the two qualities most worth cultivating - not as virtues to perform, but as genuine shifts in how one sees. Humility, he suggests, begins with accepting that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but into imperfect ones, "each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle" - and that recognition, quietly held, makes others less threatening and the world less isolating. Curiosity does something similar: it turns difference into interest rather than opposition, so that even a conversation with someone who holds opposing views becomes, as Cave puts it, "a great, life embracing pleasure." Together, these two orientations point toward something simple but rarely easy - that meaning is less something found than something grown, in the steady practice of staying open.