Marjorie Spencer was always the smartest person in the room and usually the funniest.
Marjorie was born Marjorie Wiener in Newark, New Jersey, and attended Bennington College. She married her high school sweetheart, Andrew Karp, during her college years. After that, she went to Princeton to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy. Still arguing over her dissertation, she moved to Penn State to teach philosophy. Growing tired of academia, she decided not to bother finishing her Ph.D., instead opting to move to New York City and write reviews for New York Rocker at $20 a pop. This led to writing assignments for Rolling Stone and The Village Voice.
She met her husband, Robert Spencer, at an after-hours club in New York in 1980. They married in 1982 and became partners in Nocturnal Management, working with rock and roll bands. But the music business was too small-minded for her. She had a passion for the music, but she was still a philosopher and needed something that was a better fit for her massive intellect and curiosity.
A chance encounter on the street with an old high school friend led to Marjorie’s first job in professional publishing, as an editor at Van Nostrand Reinhold. In New York, she also worked at McGraw-Hill and Wiley, editing and recruiting talent for scientific journals in a variety of fields that fascinated her.
In 2003, Marjorie was recruited by Blackwell Publishing in Boston, where she became a senior editor and then publisher. In 2013, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and retired. Five years later, she was declared cancer-free.
In retirement, she and her husband took road trips two or three times a year. Kentucky was the 50th state she visited. When retirement in rural Maine got old, they fell in love with New Orleans and moved there in 2019.
In her later years, she faced down unthinkable physical challenges with endless courage and grace. Even as her body withered, her mind never did. She was a philosopher and a poet, always. A true feminist, she nurtured and mentored many younger women.
Her passing leaves a deep void in the lives of everyone who knew her. She leaves behind her adoring husband, Robert Spencer; her beloved sister, Barbara Knight, and Barbara’s husband, Bob Knight, of Brookdale, California; her nephew, Dylan Knight, of Las Vegas, Nevada; and her niece, Leah Schmall, Leah’s husband, Jeff Schmall, and their two children, Owen and Miles, of Pleasant Hill, California.
Marjorie can’t really be summed up in a few paragraphs. But if you knew her, you loved her.
A file found on Marjorie’s laptop.
Why I hate battle imagery: my own fight is not so much with cancer as with the personification of cancer. I accept that cancer is in me, or more precisely in my cells. They are still my cells. They are not trying to kill me; they are expressing the same depredations of age, signaling gone awry, and adaptive evolutionary pressures that I, writ large, am. They are even responding quite directly to the genes my mother gave me. On a good day I don’t take cancer or the mortality lurking in its shadow personally. I research constantly in the hopes of making peace with cancer. I might as well say making peace with life.
This works for me, a philosopher by training and profession. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work for a whole lot of others, LOL. We each make our own story, and like guided imagery of other sorts, it gets us where we want to be. Our stories are beautiful to me.— Marjorie
For people who love them, words are never a waste of time. More likely they’re opportunities to find precision, and with it understanding, amid the swirl of emotions accessible to us every day. That can have real value, considering the old expression “you can’t change what you’ve got, but can always change the way you think about it.”— Marjorie
What is left after a death? Everything else.— Ursula K. Le Guin
Hope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.— John Berger
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.— Niels Bohr
The chief cause of problems is solutions.— Peter Elias
We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.— Albert Einstein
I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I’m doing. … The emotional reaction is all that matters. As long as there’s some feeling of communication, it isn’t necessary that it be understood.— John Coltrane
We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. This combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.— Carl Sagan, 1996
One day while walking through the wilderness a man stumbled upon a vicious tiger. He ran but soon came to the edge of a high cliff. Desperate to save himself, he climbed down a vine and dangled over the fatal precipice. As he hung there, two mice appeared from a hole in the cliff and began gnawing on the vine. Suddenly, he noticed on the vine a plump wild strawberry. He plucked it and popped it in his mouth. It was incredibly delicious!— Robin Martinez
I was asked on the phone yesterday, married? single? widow? I just couldn’t answer. Didn’t want to. Didn’t know how to. My heart is married. Broken, crushed, devastated, full of take my breath away pain but still married.— M. Krieg
When things were certain, they leave the domain of intelligence. The arts of both writing and reading intelligence estimates involve managing the reporting of uncertainty.— Howard Berkowitz, after Adm. Dennis Blair
Hospice leader Frank Ostaseski was at the Zen Hospice in San Francisco reading a book called Japanese Death Poems. A woman dying in hospice asked him about it and Ostaseski explained the tradition of Japanese monks who on the day of their death write a poem to convey the essential truth discovered in their life. The woman, named Sono, said she would like to write her own and did so, asking that it be pinned to her bedclothes after she died and be cremated with her. Here is her poem: Don’t just stand there with your hair turning gray, soon enough the seas will sink your little island. So while there is still the illusion of time, set out for another shore. No sense packing a bag. You won’t be able to lift it into your boat. Give away all your collections. Take only new seeds and an old stick. Send out some prayers on the wind before you sail. Don’t be afraid. Someone knows you’re coming. An extra fish has been salted.— Mona (Sono) Santacroce (1928–1995), via Frank Ostaseski
And we, observers, relentless, everywhere, intent on objects, never looking outside them! They overfill us. We arrange them. They break up. Once more we arrange. We ourselves are broken. Then who has wheeled us backwards, so that we, no matter the action, always seem to have the stance of those about to depart? Like someone on the final hill, which one more time shows him his entire valley, who turns, pauses, lingers—, and so we live, constantly saying farewell.— Rainer Maria Rilke
The expansion of the universe is the increase in distance between any two given gravitationally unbound parts of the observable universe with time. It is an intrinsic expansion whereby the scale of space itself changes. The universe does not expand ‘into’ anything and does not require space to exist ‘outside’ it.— Cody-Rose Clevidence
I realized that I could lose myself in a character. I could live in a character. It was a choice. And when I finished with that, I took a month to remember who I was. ‘What do I believe? What are my politics? What do I like and dislike?’ It took me a while, and I was depressed going back into my concerns and my politics. But there was a shift that had already happened. And the shift was, ‘Wait a second. If I can put Jim Carrey aside for four months, who is Jim Carrey? Who the hell is that?’ ... I know now he does not really exist. He’s ideas. ... Jim Carrey was an idea my parents gave me. Irish-Scottish-French was an idea I was given. Canadian was an idea that I was given. I had a hockey team and a religion and all of these things that cobble together into this kind of Frankenstein monster, this representation. It’s like an avatar. These are all the things I am. You are not an actor, or a lawyer. No one is a lawyer. There are lawyers, law is practiced, but no one is a lawyer. There is no one, in fact, there.— Jim Carrey
One of the big traps we have in the West is our intelligence, because we want to know that we know. Freedom allows you to be wise, but you cannot know wisdom, you must be wisdom. When my guru wanted to put me down, he called me ‘clever.’ When he wanted to reward me, he would call me ‘simple.’ The intellect is a beautiful servant, but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.— Ram Dass
Why did [covid] vaccinations plateau, and what are the policy lessons here? “The hardest part is to explain to the public that we acquire knowledge over time, that we learn as we go, and that learning curve is often steep, and worse, often associated with the human price. We should ask more from our public health agencies. When we follow the science, what we mean is we’re learning as we go, and we may find that the data that we have now is not what we hoped.— Paul Offit
We are members of an exclusive group: animals that recognize their own faces in a mirror. Besides us, great apes, Asian elephants, Eurasian magpies, and bottlenose dolphins are the only other animals known to recognize themselves. Dolphins as young as seven months will pose, twirl, and put their eye right up against the mirror to stare at their faces. Only humans are known to express dismay when looking at their reflections.— Joanna Connors, “The Story of a Face,” National Geographic, 2018
Everywhere and always, civilization depends on the drawing of intelligent distinctions. Jennifer Glass, a Californian who died Aug. 11, drew one. She said to her state legislators, “I’m doing everything I can to extend my life. No one should have the right to prolong my death.”— George Will
The psychologist Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
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