Pessoa's trunk and some useless papers

I mentioned Fernando Pessoa in a previous post and I got bombarded by comments about him and his work. (Most of the comments were communicated orally so don't bother to look for them here, most of my readers are either too shy to write or too direct to come and talk to me in the face).

Then I got into a conversation with one of them about the legendary trunk, where the great inventor of his own antonyms kept most of his work, unpublished until after he died. Apart from the obvious appeal old, wooden trunks may have on everybody, recalling treasures kept in wooden chests, there were connotations -for us "informaticians"- of storage, memory and registries. The mythical literary treasure, which you can actually see in the photo above contained 25,426 items (a precision that our "informatician" reflexes highly appreciated), which have still not been fully catalogued. Parts of this material have been incorporated in the Book of Disquiet, a fragmentary collection of texts Pessoa must have been writing throughout his life, taking notes on envelopes, back sides of old manuscripts or even pieces of carton.

It was then, when I thought of my endless efforts to present my -mediocre- scientific work in an appealing way for a journal editor, all the attempts to start, complete and most of all to wrap-up a scientific paper. For a moment only, I committed the sacrilege to see my incompetence as an analog to Pessoa's shyness or introversion. I imagined a trunk in my bedroom filled with pieces of paper of various sizes, colours and shapes, carrying all the unfinished abstracts I have started to write, the summaries I never managed to expand, the brief reports that never made it to become real papers, last but not least a couple of papers I have actually finished but which I doubt will ever make it to an editor's desk, due to various reasons, not necessarily relevant with the quality of the presented work.

Then I realized, that I should not take it so personally, that probably every scientist on the planet could have his own trunk full of failed or incomplete attempts to communicate his work, to send a message out there, to become heard, noticed and accredited. It is all a matter of exposure in the end, it is the same exposure dreaded by Pessoa, that we are longing for. It is thus inevitable not to fill drawers, hard disc drives or even trunks with all our fruitless endeavours. Only that, contrary to the case of Pessoa, there is the additional fear of becoming obsolete, that is in plain words, forgotten. In fact, the constant fear that drives scientists is the fear of their work being forgotten sooner or later, in the worst case -of the papers that fill trunks and never make it out- being rendered unnecessary, forgotten before it could even be remembered.

It is this fear, which marks greatest difference between works that actually matter -like Pessoa's-, works whose persistence against time and oblivion cannot even be bent by deliberate attempts to withhold and work that doesn't really worth any mention apart form in posts like this one. All we can hope for is that during our wonderfully, joyfully mediocre lifetime we have the luck to produce a couple of papers that would be remembered at least for a while and be worthy to be held in a "cultural arc" like the one of Pessoa, only much, much smaller.