These thoughts concern the evolution of knowledge and intellectual culture in the general and abstract. They are reflective of no particular environment.

We receive our disciplines like walled gardens—beautiful, precise, and fenced. We pad through them carefully, tracing old paths, diligent to not disturb the moss. The longer I study, the more I believe those walls are historical habits, not inevitable truths; refined in their purpose yet always evolving.

I’ve been getting teary-eyed lately thinking about the great askers in history, our Galileos, Hypatias, Wollstonecrafts, Woolfs. It moves me profoundly, how questioning has incited every movement to remake and renew.

Knowledge, like water, seeps through citation, conversation, and the quiet generosity of people who share what they’ve made. The digital age didn’t invent that impulse—it just revealed how ancient it was. Copyists in monasteries, scribes at their tables, scholars passing marginalia hand to hand: they were already practicing open access, one leaf at a time. Preservation depends on circulation: a text survives because it’s passed along.

The archive’s great secret is that it wants to be read.

The trouble of big projects isn’t the beginning, when the spark of the idea sustains you, nor the final stretch, when you have the promise of closure and the satisfaction of naming what you’ve completed. It’s the middle, at least for me. The quiet question arrives: is this worth the hours, the labor, the limited energy I have? I wonder whether I’m still uncovering something. Every metric, every dataset, every traced line starts to blur.

That question finds me somewhat often—when a script won’t compile, when a line refuses to resolve, when a day’s tracing yields nothing new. It’s never some dramatic collapse, just a slow thinning of conviction.

I used to take that as failure, as proof that I wasn’t cut out for long projects or that real scholars didn’t feel this way. But doubt, I’ve learned, is part of the method. It means I’ve reached the part of the work where certainty would be dishonest. Projects that matter eventually resist you—they stop confirming your brilliance and start asking what you actually believe in.

Doubt is the test of whether the initial fire was real. To stay with something is the difference between driven and devoted. Ambition wants progress; devotion wants presence. The work I trust most emerges from that quieter side of the self, the kind that endures even without visible reward.

When I’m in that fog, I do two things. The first is find milestones to celebrate and share; that’s a major function of the APEX Updates series. The second is think about field archaeologists in the trench. Most days, you don’t find anything spectacular. You scrape, record, bag, label, and go home covered in dust. Perhaps you down some Advil if the ground was especially uncooperative that day. (I’ve been there.) Meaning comes later, when the layers are mapped and the fragments aligned.

The paradox of discovery: the ground never tells you you’re close.

If Marginalia 3 was about the spark that begins a project, this is about what happens when the spark dies down. To keep going is to trust in slow revelation. That’s what this phase is: not failure, not even frustration, but the apprenticeship to patience.

I get it. I was you. You’re nervous about starting college, and fair enough: who knows if this is going to be the right place for you?

Chances are, you’re not going to be the perfect student. You won’t always love the assignments, but you’ll come alive in the margins—tracing things back, asking your own questions. You’ll get some praise, sure—but also enough silence and uncertainty to make you doubt your footing. College is hard: your GPA is probably not what it was, but that can be one of the best things to happen to you. You hopefully learn other ways of measuring growth, and you’ll meet people who see what you’re made of even if the transcript doesn’t.

In time, you’ll find your people. It takes a while, but when it clicks, it really clicks. Play your cards right, and you’ll get something that feels like home: gathering mentors who consistently go to bat for you, friends who see the long game, and a self that doesn’t fold.

No one ever quite knows how they keep landing on their feet. But somehow, most do—through some mix of the grace of others and a resilience of their own.

You won’t always see the shape of what you’re building while you’re in the middle of it. But stay with it. Something durable, and fitting, is finding its way toward you.

With affection,

T

I’ve come to think of method less as a set of tools than as a kind of temperament: a composite of instincts, tolerances, pleasures, and refusals. What I reach for first—what I avoid, or delay—says as much about me as any personality test ever could.

My research temperament is structured by two main drives: one towards depth and the other towards care. I’m drawn to slow practice—hand-tracing inscriptions, line-by-line translation, annotating with attention. I like to feel what a text is doing in context, on the object, in the curve of the letter. I start at the center and work outward. This drive isn’t just intellectual—it’s emotional. It’s about fidelity to the thing at hand, a form of care that undergirds both my method and my ethics.

Care, for me, shows up as both method and ethic. When a topic feels especially resonant—diaspora, language loss, archival absence—I become meticulous, sometimes overly so. I revise and rework because I want to honor the stakes. And when I know others will read it—colleagues, strangers, professors—I feel a sense of responsibility that sharpens everything. It comes from a wish to think it through with integrity.

That same temperament—the mix of care and depth—also shapes how I move through time. My pace is uneven. I tend toward long stretches of saturation—reading twenty books at once, letting ideas percolate—punctuated by sudden bursts of output, where everything connects at once. My brain is highly associative and lends itself to this kind of work. Texts imprint themselves. I’ll remember something I read a decade ago—exactly where, on which page, in what margin. But that same connective capacity can make writing difficult, especially academic writing, which demands resolution. I resist closure. I prefer the bracket, the margin, the slow unfurling of something not yet finished. That’s part of why this blog exists. It’s a place to let the incomplete still mean something.

Which is to say: method reveals more than habit. It discloses a relation to uncertainty, to audience, to delight. If someone looked only at my notes, my file structures, my markups, they’d see an unusual mix of chaos and precision. They’d know I’m curious, restless, attentive. But they might miss the joy. The methods reflect care—but it’s here, in the writing, that joy becomes legible. That’s a method, too.