Margins
“Sento-me à porta e embebo meus olhos e ouvidos nas cores e nos sons da paisagem, e canto lento, para mim só, vagos cantos que componho enquanto espero.”
“Se o que deixar escrito no livro dos viajantes puder, relido um dia por outros, entretê-los também na passagem, será bem. Se não o lerem, nem se entretiverem, será bem também.”
“I sit at the door and let my eyes and ears drink in the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I sing, slowly and only to myself, vague songs I make up while I wait.”
“If what I leave written in the travellers’ book can, when read one day by others, give them some pleasure in passing, that will be well. If they do not read it, or take no pleasure in it, that will be well too.”
Looking again and again
Some things are difficult to see not because they are hidden, but because they are always there.
Familiarity has a way of making the world transparent. We look without quite noticing what we are looking at.
Science has taught me to be suspicious of that transparency.
An unexpected observation is not necessarily important. Most are not. An experiment can mislead us, an instrument can misbehave, and coincidence is always possible.
But occasionally something refuses to disappear.
The difficult part is recognising that it deserves another look.
I have come to think that this requires a particular kind of attention: enough scepticism not to fall in love with every anomaly, but enough curiosity not to dismiss too quickly the one that may matter.
There is also a difference between noticing something and holding on to it.
A result may remain in a notebook, a number in a paper, an image in memory. Its significance may not be clear when we first encounter it. Sometimes it becomes meaningful only years later, because another question has emerged, or because we ourselves have changed enough to see the same observation differently.
For years, water was simply there.
Until it wasn't.
Choice
I have been thinking about choice for much longer than I have been thinking about luminescence, lanthanides or water.
For a very long time, I have wondered how much of what we become is chosen and how much emerges from circumstance, memory and the people we encounter.
We like to imagine a choice as something made by a stable self: a person stands before several possible paths and decides which one to follow.
But the person making the choice has a history.
Previous decisions have already changed what seems possible, what matters, what we notice and even what we are capable of wanting.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if, after a long sequence of choices, we could somehow return to the first crossroads. Would we choose the same path?
I suspect we might not — not because the alternatives had changed, but because we had.
The crossroads could be the same. The person standing before them would not.
We can return to an earlier choice in memory, but never as the person who first made it.
Circumstances matter too. So do accidents. And other people enter the story in ways we could rarely have predicted in advance.
This does not make choice meaningless.
It makes it more interesting.
I recognise this clearly when I look back at science.
A decision made for one reason led me into a question I had not expected. A collaboration changed the way I approached a problem. An observation shifted the direction of the work. What began as a choice about what to do next sometimes became a change in the person deciding what next would mean.
There is a temptation, looking back, to arrange all of this into a coherent trajectory. I distrust that temptation: the path becomes visible afterwards, but it was not necessarily visible while I was walking it.
Perhaps that is why I remain interested in the space between intention and circumstance.
We make choices.
And in making them, we also shape the person who will make the next choice.
Memory
I have long suspected that a life is made, to a remarkable extent, from memory.
Not simply from what happened, but from what remains of what happened — and from the meaning it acquires as we return to it.
Memory is not a recording.
We retain fragments. Some become sharper with time, others fade. An event that once seemed incidental may later acquire an importance we could not have recognised when it occurred.
The past has not changed.
But the person remembering it has.
And that changes what the past can mean in the present.
Perhaps this is why memory sometimes feels less like retrieval than reconstruction. We revisit what happened from somewhere we could not have occupied before, carrying everything that has happened since.
But reconstruction is not restoration.
Other people are part of that process too.
I sometimes imagine two people walking together along the water’s edge on an otherwise deserted beach in a small bay.
When they reach the far end of the bay, they stop, turn around, and look back at the path they have walked together.
The sea has already begun to erase their footprints.
In some stretches, the two trails remain side by side. In others, only fragments of one or the other can still be seen. Elsewhere, the sea has erased both.
Perhaps shared memory is something like that.
The walk belonged only to the two of them, yet neither trail preserves the whole journey. Even taken together, the surviving footprints cannot reconstruct it completely. One may retain a trace where the other has lost it; some parts have disappeared for both.
In that sense, our memories are not entirely private possessions.
They are also places where relationships continue to exist.
Memory does not merely preserve the person we were.
It participates in the person we are becoming.