alchemy is about facilitating change, growth, evolution, or transformation in another. alchemy is what we do when we offer services or products of any kind.
He would identify the topic he wanted to focus on for the next season of life. He would usually be weighing what he planned to do during this time, like teaching a seminar, writing articles, attending conferences, etc.
He would then revisit key papers and ideas from that topic as a way of refreshing his mind.
“librarians are what the internet is aching for—people on task to care about the past, with respect to the past and also to what it shall bequeath to the future.” Can we reimagine libraries for the digital age?
As a method, marginalia remind us that all annotation is allusive, that all literature is connected to everything else, that the reader influences the writer as surely as the other way around, and even if the later has been dead for centuries.