Discovering what I was not Seeking: A Brief Narrative

The two questions that SubStance asks us are beautiful in that they link knowledge to a desire for discovery. But by their very openness, these questions are immense. Faced with the infinite number of possible responses, who does not feel the same dizziness felt by the child who, looking at the starry heavens, is asked “which is your favorite star?” He must learn to narrow his scope, and to accept a certain arbitrariness. And he does so—”that one there!” he exclaims. Likewise, observers of animal communities tell us that when faced with a large group of individuals—fish, birds, or mammals—a predator is lost, dazzled, unable to make his choice, and fails. He, too, must learn to select and isolate a single prey among the thousands available, and to stick with it. I will be attempting something similar in what follows. Nevertheless, my first temptation was to respond to the two questions with lists of all kinds of objects of intellectual or other interest. That would have given an aleatory enumeration in the style of Borges or Perec (which is not without its charm, but in this case would have been a way of getting off the hook).