In Peru my blood is spicy, marinated with ají peppers.  The ají is a waxy, red vegetable that burns hotter than embers.  It is chopped and cooked with fresh onions, garlic, and tomatoes, and then blended and cooled to make a sauce that can be added to almost any dish.  White rice and vegetables is a staple meal in Peru, and I have never seen it served without the reddish-orange ají sauce that screams down my throat.  Ají can adorn fish, pasta, and of over three thousand species of potato native to Peru. I eat so much of this pepper that I can feel it tingling in my stomach for hours after a meal.

In Peru my blood is thicker, trying to pump as much oxygen as the atmosphere provides in the Andes Mountains. In Lima, there is plenty of oxygen available.  Lima grows out of the coast of Peru, not in the high peaks.  The city spreads each year, slowly reaching out its cables of industry and highways of modernization to abandoned towns and villages. There is little oxygen available in the small city of Ayacucho, which sits at nine thousand feet above sea level, and I gasp and pant just climbing one flight of stairs.  I fill my lungs until my ribcage aches, though, and my blood is cleansed.

As my blood grows thicker, I grow stronger, hiking the foothills of the Andes.  There is a cross at the top of a mountain on the edge of Ayacucho.  La Cruz. The first time I hiked there, my blood was too thin. Just walking up the steep street made my head spin.  My lungs were stale sponges, and no oxygen reached my muscles.  By the time I reached the stairs I was already sweating.  Turquoise stairs start where the street ends and continue until the mountain’s halfway point.  There are three flights, straight up, followed by dirt paths.  The first flight of stairs runs past apartment buildings, gardens, paved roads.  The last flight draws a line through mud huts with tin roofs.  Old women pass me easily carrying heavy sacks of grains and leading cattle, while I concentrate on not fainting.  I can see the cross a long time before I reach it.  It peeks out at me after every turn, teasing me, looking farther away each time.  When I touch it, two hours later, I feel like I am on top of the world.  A cross no bigger than my fingernail from the main square now stretches fifty feet into the sky.  I make the journey to touch the cross eight times, and by the eighth I can hike up the mountain quickly without losing my breath.  I feel strong.  At night I can see the cross, lit up on the side of the mountain, the brightest light in the whole city.

I grow taller over the six weeks I am in Peru. I am tall in the United States, but I am a giant in Peru.  Initially, I am a foot taller than the people around me. Peruvians stare at me when I walk down the street.  The women in the market ask me how old I am and then exclaim that I am so very tall.  I laugh and smile because they don’t see that I am getting even taller.  Each day I grow at least an inch.  When I wash my clothes and hang them to dry on the roof, I grow a little.  When I catch a bus with friends to go to a neighboring city, I grow a bit. I walk around the town without getting lost, and I grow some more.  At the end of six weeks, the townspeople still stare at my height. They are not accustomed to seeing tall Americans. They don’t see that I am even taller than I once was.

It’s not just my height that changes.  Dust coats my skin, and I don’t think it will ever leave. Even after I take a shower, I feel chalky.  My skin dries out so much that little red pricks appear when I move my hands because the skin at my knuckles is tearing. I prefer this to my alternative, though.  Ayacucho has two seasons: dry and rainy. The Northern Hemisphere’s summer is their dry season and winter is their rainy season.  This is a complete dichotomy in Ayacucho.  There can be no rain for six months, and then just when the soil has dried completely, turned to dust, and floated away on a breeze, downpours wash away entire mountainsides each day for the rest of the year.  It is a harsh cycle, from one extreme to the next.  I experienced the dry season, and while my dehydrated skin may have cracked, at least the sun was shining.

In Ayacucho, my eyes grow deeper.  I work with about fifteen children at the Neri García center for street kids.  The center is a small building next to a market, and it is for boys and girls who work in the market with their parents.  These children range in age from ten to fifteen, and I help them with homework.  We read books, learn long division, joke, play soccer, and paint masks.  They call me “Profesora” as they run into the center with empty metal carts that carried market goods a few hours before.  Alfredo jumps through the door, smiling, at nine.  I know that he wakes up at four in the morning so that he can help his parents before he comes to the center to do homework and rest before school.  Miguel works in the market, too, but tells me one day that he wants to grow up to be an engineer.  Edison, who I only see once in a while, is an artist, the best drawer of the group, and I teach him about linear perspective.  My eyes are brown, not as light as my sister’s honey colored eyes.  They are brown, but they are not as they once were.  Now they are different for having seen Miguel, Yanet, Alfredo, and Yover.   Deeper for having reflected Edison, Sylvia, José Luis, and all of the bright-eyed children I met at Neri García.

Back in Lima, one last time before returning to the States, my heart breaks and mends and breaks.  I feel contaminated here, surrounded by McDonalds and highways and five star hotels.  I miss the clean dust of Ayacucho already.  I board the plane that will take me back to my home, and I think how strange it is to leave a place that now contains a part of me.  A part of me is still in Peru, on the top of the mountain, and a part of Peru lives on somewhere inside me.  I hope my blood stays a little spicy.

 

 

—Leah Schecter is a staff writer.

I left my ID card in the library. I left it at the bar, in the cafe. When I went to the next library to pick up a book, I realized I had left my card, so I went back. Back at the first library, the guard did not let me in to get my card because I did not have a card. He said I could get a pass from the other library, the one I had just returned from. I did not want to go back, because my shoes were uncomfortable. I asked a passing card holder to sign me in. The guard said I could not be signed in, because he knew I was a student. I asked him how he knew I was a student. He said I had just told him. I said, if I am a student, then you should let me into the library. He said he could not do that. He said I would have to go back to the other library to get a pass. I did not want to go back to that library, because I was wearing the shoes. I waited. Then I went to the other library to get a pass. I was right about the shoes. I hated to hear them clicking on the ground.

“Your absence is as of the blue rose from the kingdom of flowers.
Who knows, some day you may yet appear.”
—From Seven Poems, Benoy Mojumdar, 1969
Translated from the Bengali by Jyotirmoy Datta

It’s what they have been waiting for:  a statuesque model in a black evening gown strides onstage, a bouquet of roses in her gold-bangled arms. She waves at the audience, some of whom oooh and ahhh in appreciation, some only breaking into polite applause. Cameras flash on her cocktail dress and luminous smile, the photographers jostling each other for a better view—not of the woman herself, who is after all only the last in a row of models displaying Suntory Ltd.’s newest product line. It’s the pale mauve roses she holds that they have come to see.

The date is October 26, 2009, more than twenty-three years after the first scientists and biochemical engineers at a small Australian firm set upon their quest to create a true blue rose. They could not have known then that their effort would eventually span four continents, involve hundreds of researchers, and cost over forty million dollars. And at the end of the road, this.

“A rose the color of the sky just before sunset,” the announcer booms out at the crowd. “The Suntory Applause!”

. . .

As long as the rose has symbolized love and beauty, the blue rose has been its missing counterpart: the symbol of a beauty that does not exist. Of literally hundreds of rose varieties, nearly all developed through artificial breeding methods, none naturally contain pigments in the blue range—a fact that has frustrated breeders for centuries.

In terms of natural selection, there is no reason why they should. Rose blooms, like all flowers, exist for the sole reason of attracting pollinators, and only recently in evolutionary time have human aesthetic preferences exerted any influence. Biologists theorize that, unlike violets or petunias, which often rely on bees that favor the blue wavelength of light, roses evolved alongside pollinators that prefer red and yellow: moths, small birds, and differnet types of bees. The function of any pigment is to signal nectar resources to pollinators, and roses differentiated themselves with a distinctive scent.

The blue rose stands out so clearly in the human imagination today precisely because it has for so long evaded human grasp. Unattainable, it came to symbolize unrequited love; transcendental, it came to evoke moral perfection; ethereal, it has been co-opted to name cultural ephemera from rock bands to mystery novels. The very fact of its nonexistence made it possible for blue roses to mean all things to all people, whether as the symbol of immortality in the 2006 movie “Pan’s Labyrinth,” or as a badge of surreal creativity to Moscow symbolists, including Wassily Kadinsky, whose Blue Rose group comprised leading figures of the Russian avant-garde.

. . .

The world market for cut flowers generates $10 billion a year in sales, out of which roses account for nearly half. Bridal roses, ceremonial roses, Valentine’s and Mother’s Day and anniversary roses: an entire industry is built on the classic symbol of romantic love. When you actually consider what it is you are buying in a rose—a few ounces of dead plant matter much like a stalk of celery or a switch from a tree—the fact that the average bouquet of a dozen long-stemmed red roses costs nearly sixty dollars is evidence enough that the whole industry is based on one of the most successful marketing schemes in the history of the world.

It is no wonder, then, that a group of Australian biological engineers saw in flower genetics a promising business application for one of the great scientific breakthroughs of the 1980s. Genetic engineers had just made significant strides in the splicing and manipulation of plant DNA, and they hoped to apply new genetic methods to the yet-untouched field of horticulture. With the promise of gene transfer, anything seemed possible. With those high hopes, and only a little capital, Calgene Pacific Pty Ltd. was born.

From their first day of work, the Calgene Pacific researchers were on a mission to create an authentic and marketable blue rose. But to copy the indigo-violet hue of grapes, blueberries, blackberries, and eggplants—which all have different genes contributing to the same function—presented a complex puzzle that all involved knew would take years to decipher. They entertained the possibility of testing their techniques—and consumer demand—by simultaneously working on the development of blue carnations and other decorative blooms, but as managing director Richard Dalling had no qualms assuring the world, perfecting the blue rose was the firm’s raison d’être. When questioned on the firm’s single-minded object, his reply was always blunt, and clear: “It’s the Holy Grail.”

Edwina Cornish, a petite woman with a halo of auburn hair curling at her chin, can still remember the day she entered Calgene Pacific’s labs for the first time nearly twenty years ago. “I was so impressed by the new IBM computers,” she says today. “That, and the camaraderie. We danced to Michael Jackson on our late-night breaks.” She also remembers the incredible goals they immediately set for themselves: “Five years. Five years at the most.”

She laughs, now. “How wrong we were.”

. . .

Whenever they were asked whom their product was meant to serve—in a tone that unerringly meant that it had no audience at all—the Calgene Pacific executives had the same quick answer: the Japanese.

They weren’t merely being facetious. Even the scientists themselves worried that Western markets might be disappointing. It is the red rose, after all, that European culture had indoctrinated most of the world to love. Lost to the legacy of Shakespeare and Donne, most Americans and Europeans can only imagine the blue alternative as a novelty, a touch of dramatic flair. There’s a touch of the ridiculous about them, like purple cows or green ketchup, and romance rarely sits well with ridicule. At the crucial juncture, could risk-averse men seeking only a conflict-free anniversary be counted upon to reach past the comfort of deep red blooms for a pricier blue alternative?

Calgene Pacific’s stategists doubted it. They chose a very different market instead: wealthy businessmen and women in Japan who might give them to their peers—not as symbols of love, but merely in the course of conducting their mundane but critical daily affairs  “The Japanese are ritualistic gift-givers,” Dalling explained to investors and journalists alike. He described to them a culture in which the word novelty had no negative connotations, in which a blue rose might be worth its $78 price tag simply “because they are unique.”

A typical end-user might send roses when a business associate won a new contract, or to a new client if he did; when her boss’s daughter graduated from university, or to ensure that her own got in. The price tag of a dozen blue roses alone—nearly a thousand dollars—would prove well enough how much one admired its recipient. As with a bottle of Chateau Margaux or an ice sculpture, the fact that a bouquet of midnight blue blooms has neither longevity nor purpose could only add to its appeal.

Even skeptical media critics were eventually convinced that the odd habits of the Japanese were yet again the proper targets of scorn. “It’s important to their whole social being,” Dalling said. His subtext may have been insidious, but it was certainly a comfort to Calgene Pacific’s investors. “We are merely mercenaries of another culture’s inane whims,” he seemed to be saying: his team had not fallen under the blue rose’s spell—they were simply in it for the money.

. . .

Five years later, Calgene Pacific’s original funding had nearly dried up, and it was in desperate need of more money. Progress on mapping the rose’s genome was not coming as quickly as the team had hoped—as they now admitted to one possible investor after another, getting the rose onto the market might cost upwards of $20 million.

The first of these funds had come from an unlikely source. When the company was first founded in 1986, the state-sponsored Victorian Investment Corporation (VIC) pledged $1 million as part of an initiative to increase employment in the Melbourne area. The effort soon became a political disaster, losing nearly a third of its $60 million budget in a single year. By 1991, a change in government meant the VIC was facing dissolution. But the blue rose happened to be one of the government’s few winning calls—and in order to win investors, the team decided to publicize their advances and shocked the horticultural world with the announcement that they had identified a gene that created the delphinidin pigment responsible for the shade of deep, incandescent blue found in delphiniums and petunias—and were now looking for a way to integrate it into the right strain of rose.

Steve Chandler had only been with the firm for two years when the first media attention descended upon Calgene Pacific.  He recalls his colleagues’ shock when they started to receive calls from The Economist, The New York Times, and every major newspaper in Australia. “It was a great moment,” he says in a clipped British accent. “But we were kind of bemused that the journalists kept calling about the blue rose project. It seemed to fascinate them, I don’t know why.”

With Calgene Pacific’s budget woes, public interest in the blue roses had come just in time. The publicity brought new business relationships, and within months, the firm found a more traditional investor whose interest seemed to confirm everything Dalling had claimed in the early years. Suntory Ltd., the leading beverage manufacturer in Japan, approached him about acquiring fifteen percent of Calgene Pacific’s shares. As they had always known, Japan would be their first market, and their best.

If the small team of Australians were not the only ones interested in horticulture’s Holy Grail, they were now its best-funded. By early 1992, Calgene Pacific had acquired its main rival, the Dutch biotechnology company Florigene, gaining entrée to the European flower market as well as strategic alliances with its previous owners, the DNA Plant Technology Corporation and Zaadunie, both leaders in gene insertion techniques. The genetic-horticulture world lauded the marriage of two companies that, between them, held the patents to technologies isolating the gene for delphinidin and the method for inserting it into the rose genome.

Newly invigorated, the firm renamed itself Florigene Ltd. (“Essentially for marketing purposes,” Chandler admits) and set about completing its mission. “We expect to complete the remaining technical objectives by 1992, and we are confident that trials of the first blue rose will begin in 1993,” Dalling told The New York Times.

. . .

Nothing attracts charlatans and fools like the seemingly impossible, and so, like sightings of Elvis or El Dorado, tales of the mythical blue rose pepper history. Its first recorded false discovery can be traced to the thirteenth century, when the Moors first began using indigo dyes to create blue—or bluish—blooms out of white rosebushes. In those times as in all times, the rarity of blue roses gave them a regal and ethereal beauty. At that time, feeding blue water to a rosebush’s roots was the equivalent of magic, but a painfully expensive kind. The claim that these roses were naturally blue fell apart quickly.

By Renaissance times, blue roses created by simply soaking petals in indigo were common gifts among the merchant class. Breeders continued to pursue a ‘natural’ breed without success—except in the common imagination. In the nineteenth century, reports circulated of a rose breeder in Ulster discovering a single blue bloom in his seedling patch. It was said that he destroyed it immediately, believing that the mutant roses would corrupt public taste—and, perhaps, morals.

But if the morally-torn rose breeder lived in myth, the unscrupulous peddler was very much a reality. In 1864, The American Agriculturalist reported a widespread scam involving blue roses and tree strawberries, cautioning readers to beware in their areas of peddlers selling ‘astonishing’ fruit. One such hack managed to scam a town magistrate in Mayer, Virginia, among other upstanding if gullible citizens, planting rosebushes he advertised as “absolutely Genuinne [sic] and real” in front the courthouse—when the original blue blooms fell, the original patriotic planters became a disappointing candy-cane stripe. Citizens were not amused. The local Dispatch ran a first-page article above the fold: “Blue Roses A Fraud!”

. . .

Eight years had passed since the renamed Florigene boldly promised to take the cut-flower world by storm. By now, the blue rose project had burned through nearly $30 million dollars. To appease investors, the company decided to release what had originally been mere test subjects for the delphinidin-insertion experiments: the world’s first blue-spectrum carnation, the called Moonshadow, in a pale shade of mauve, and the Moondust, its deep violet cousin.

“It’s very exciting—we already have some nice rose flowers with interesting mauve and lilac colors and hope to have several different shades of blue within the next few years,” boasted Chin-yi Lu, principal research scientist at Florigene’s Dutch laboratory, when The Economist called.

Within the company itself, though, the mood was more ambivalent. The mauve carnations could only be described as a disappointment: Suntory wasn’t even interested in acquiring the rights to the brand. It wasn’t that the scientific breakthroughs had ended—it was merely that the escape from each dead end seemed to lead to a new one.  Florigene was now incorporating a special hairpin RNA interference technology developed by the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO) to switch off the existing color genes in roses and open pathways for the blue pigment to express itself. But even when all the right genes were turned on, and off, and on again, the rose remained frustratingly not-quite-blue. If once at the forefront of plant engineering, Florigene was rapidly becoming irrelevant.

Cornish was beginning to feel hopeless about the entire ordeal. Somewhere on the pathway from lilac to blue, nature had stepped in and refused to yield. She contemplated leaving the company—but the board offered her a promotion: with Dalling’s departure, she took over as managing director of the Melbourne laboratory.

. . .

Halfway around the world, the team suddenly gained an unexpected adversary when researchers at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine stumbled upon an entirely new method of turning roses—and, really, anything else—blue. Amusingly enough, the answer lay within the human body itself.

While studying how drugs metabolize in the liver, graduate student named Elizabeth Gillam stumbled across an enzyme taken from a human liver that had stained a flask of bacteria a deep cobalt blue. When she showed it to her boss, Peter Guengrich, he was confused—and then thrilled. “We were aware that there were people in the world who had been interested in making colored flowers, especially a blue rose, for a number of years,” he explained happily to the journalists who suddenly descended upon his laboratory.

The team at Florigene was thrust into the spotlight once again to defend their pallid blooms. “It depends on how you describe blue,” snapped John Mason, the Melbourne research manager, when his patience wore thin. “This is a very sensitive topic for us and unfortunately I cannot comment further.”

. . .

If most gene modification technologies have a frankly utilitarian purpose—to develop disease-resistant crops and better-tasting animals, for example, or even to cure genetic disease—the blue rose, admittedly, does not. But with less social purpose comes less social baggage: the idea of an oddly-colored bloom inspires neither vague apprehension about carcinogen-fattened beef, nor full-fledged paranoia about Gattaca-style genetic class warfare. A few serious horticulturalists may be able to summon genuine concern over cross-pollination, but all in all, a rose is just a rose. Why, then, does the idea of so much money spent on creating a natural-born blue rose—when dyed ones are so cheaply accessible—somehow seem even more wrong?

It’s not merely because they will be indulgences of the rich: not only are single blue roses within reach for most consumers, they are a far cry from the prices of most luxury goods. And it cannot derive from discomfort with genetic modification in general, since humans have been tinkering with the genetics of flowers nearly as long as we have noticed them. The kingdom of flora have always served as a canvas for imaginative gardeners—but their instruments were blunt and their genetic technique limited to crude meiosis. Centuries of human effort, then, yielded scores of pink roses and even red-orange ones—but the horizon of possibilities was firmly circumscribed by plant sex.

Gene modification techniques are not so limited. Suddenly, traits can move between species—even, as the liver cell research demonstrated, between kingdoms. From blue roses, it is not so far a leap to glow-in-the-dark puppies (if you’ve ever met an eight year-old child, you know the market exists).  Far more than passionate and futile attempts to combat death, this is what it means to play God: our mastery of science will finally give us mastery over life itself, with the rest of the plant and animal kingdom the canvas for human imagination.

This vision is as seductive as it is surreal. With nothing to limit us but our humility, who knows what fad will dictate and science provide? History is full of examples of humans exerting their power over the animal kingdom, but genetic engineering, unlike growing kittens in bottles or training rats to locate mines (both of which raised PETA’s reasonable ire) would not cause animals any pain—certainly less so than factory farming. If Gelett Burgess’s infamous ditty is any indication (“I never saw a purple cow / I never hope to see one”), there is something about using science to create a purple cow that seems worse than using it to create a meatier one.

In the end, of course, the violence of absurdity is much like any postmodern assault on preconceptions: it can only be wielded against ourselves. It’s all the same for the cow.

. . .

Florigene’s quest concluded as those of nearly all plucky little companies do: with a buyout and a compromise. In December of 2003, Suntory Ltd. bought up nearly 99% of its subsidiary’s shares in order to gain the rights to the pale mauve roses that stubbornly refused to become blue.

Suntory quickly took the lead on the blue rose project, placing its own Tokyo-based research team led by Yoshi Tanaka on the case. Chandler, who was still working with Florigene fifteen years later, was sorry to see it go, but he now claims there was little controversy over the decision. “They were going to use techniques they had gained from working with various artificial flavors in their beverage business,” he says, “and working on it in Japan would be better for marketing later on. It was the right business decision.”

When their efforts failed to break though the Florigene team’s stalemate, however, Suntory decided to market the mauve roses they already had. By 2003, Tanaka was leading field trials and scouting for the right South American grower to produce his distinctive crop. Within a year, the beverage giant threw the weight of its marketing colossus into the blue rose, and its humble subsidiary Florigene once again became a media darling. But Edwina Cornish sensed her time there had reached its natural conclusion. She left the company and moved on to teach at Monash University, where she was soon named Deputy-Vice Chancellor of Research. “I don’t regret the time I spent at Calgene,” she says now.

Florigene would continue to sell the Moondust and Moonshadow carnations under its own brand to the present day. But the blue rose project now belonged to Suntory and its hype machine alone.

. . .

Even the Japanese are not willing to pay eighty dollars for a mauve rose when lilac ones sell for under ten. In the end, the Suntory Applause was priced at a mere $25 per bloom—and even then, it was greeted by the gardening world with a resounding yawn. To this day, authentically blue-ish roses have not seen significant release outside Japan; Suntory continues to list the project as one of its current research efforts. “More are in the pipeline—colors ranging from lavender to pale violet to, you know, mauve,” Chandler says. He can list the scientific puzzles still in their way: pH. Background pigments. Choosing the right variety of rose. “It’s that simple.”

It’s that simple—but it has always been that simple. Perhaps Florigene and its investors simply placed too much faith the process of their discovery—and perhaps even a bluer rose would have eventually faded quickly from novelty into the mundane. But there is something to be said for their choice of subject: unlike other nonexistent things—hen’s teeth and bicycle-riding fish come to mind—blue roses have never suffered the irony of becoming laughable. They suffer instead the indignity of poor imitations—silk flowers, dyed white blooms, and now this travesty of mauve—each reminding us of what we have yet to find.

Perhaps it’s not even the blue rose but the crazy quest itself that matters. Actually finding the Holy Grail, after all, would have ruined many a medieval story and at least one middlebrow action novel. Even Steve Chandler, who has spent twenty-four of his twenty-six working years at Florigene doing everything—“from research, to marketing, to operations, to press, oh yes, just about everything”—to create and sell blue roses and carnations, sometimes forgets why he is there. “Maybe paying a mortgage,” he says, “I don’t know.” A pause. “I got stuck here, I suppose. It’s a compelling business.”

Just a business, then: the Grail, too, was cast in gold.

Should we care that when Suntory’s competitors at Vanderbilt discovered their miraculous enzyme in the human liver, it was roses they chose to modify? As Guengerich willingly admitted, “We could have tried to create blue cotton, blue anything, really.” But the financial promise of the blue rose was ultimately too tempting to resist.

“I would have called you crazy five years ago if you told me I would be pursuing a blue rose,” he told journalists who suddenly began to call, bemused at the attention after years of work on life-saving drugs went ignored. “It’s not something we set out to do,” he said, again and again, as if that was any justification, as if the search for a true blue rose required one at all.

—Elise Liu is an associate editor.

Buckminster Fuller—visionary, futurist, owner of twenty-eight patents (including the geodesic dome)—was also an obsessive archivist. From 1917 until his death in 1983, Fuller documented every fifteen minutes of his life in the Dymaxion Chronofile, which contained copies of all his correspondence as well as newspaper clippings, business cards, sketches, and even dry-cleaning bills. The complete collection, now at Stanford University, takes up 270 feet of shelf space.

Ever the technology enthusiast, Fuller would have been delighted by the archival possibilities of the digital age. In fact, Fuller’s feat would not seem so impressive today, when anyone can fire off a tweet at fifteen-minute intervals and e-mail correspondence is saved automatically and indefinitely on Google’s servers. With the explosion of digital memory capacity, to save is the default rather than the exception. Digital bits, though not physically tangible, have become more enduring than pieces of paper. Even without active archiving, we have each accumulated a massive dossier on our digital lives through emails, blogs, text messages, and the like. Now that this archive exists, what is the point of it? Who, if anyone, cares to wade through it?

Critic and poet Adam Kirsch imagines a distant future when archeology is a matter of digital excavation. In this future, technology has to the point where infinite resources can be devoted to understanding the past. “Literature tells us the way people thought they were and wanted to be seen; but these random, personal, undeliberated traces of lives show us the way they really were. Evidence, not eloquence, is what we need to understand our origins.” For Kirsch, these “traces” are blogs and Facebook profiles, but he mischaracterizes them here. Although more organic than the process of publishing literature, the creation of blogs and Facebook profiles is hardly “undeliberated,” and to claim them to be pure in expression would be naïve. Any content created for the public eye necessarily reflects how the creator wants to be seen.

To see people as they really were, we have to look elsewhere. True privacy on the Internet exists only between man and machine. The search engine, with its precisely timed blinking cursor, is an impersonal text box where one can pour the deepest desires and most embarrassing questions. (Unsurprisingly, pornography accounts for a quarter of search queries.) It is because of the impersonal nature of the search engine that these searches are an expression of personal desire, unfiltered by social expectations. After all, what we search for is what we want, and what we want tells us something about ourselves.

The most potent expression of this idea comes, from all places, an advertisement. Google debuted its first television ad during the 2010 Super Bowl. Competition for flashiness among Super Bowl ads is as intense as the competition between the football teams playing the Super Bowl, but Google went for something simple. A string of search terms appears on the familiar minimalistic Google page: “study abroad paris,” “how to impress a french girl,” “jobs in paris,” and finally “how to assemble a crib.” In essence, a love story unfolds across these individually meaningless search terms. This digital ephemera, when properly curated, can tell a meaningful story.

Curation is the key to unlocking the significance in even the most “undeliberated” data. The entire digital archive, which accumulates at a frightening rate with every email, search, and blog post, only makes sense when curated. An unassembled mass is as useful as nothing at all, and even a completely searchable archive lacks a natural entry point. Every one of us leaves behind piles of digital debris with each keystroke.

So who is there to curate the mess? It seems all too conceivable that we will soon be poring over the collected emails and tweets of eminent figures, but just as there are thousands of books sitting forgotten in library basements, most digital debris will remain unmined. Kirsch optimistically postulates a far-off artificial intelligence to make sense of it all, whereas Google has its marketing department. Neither of these are real options.

Fuller’s Chronofile was not merely an archive but an extension of his biological memory. When looking for a fact—a person’s name or the price he paid for a car—he could intuit where to find it among the dozens of volumes, and his “life and experiences are brought into focus by using the Chronofile.” Curation and memory are intertwined: Fuller was the curator of his own archive. While this system worked for Fuller himself, the Chronofile was only indexed in his mind. After his death, the Chronofile, to the rest of us, became nothing more than a massive collection of papers, organized chronologically, but the needles stitching together narrative and thematic threads are lost in the haystack. Cross-referencing the Chronofile is a still an ongoing endeavor for the Buckminster Fuller Institute at Stanford today.

Fuller’s lifetime achievements ensure that an institute will devote resources to cataloguing his papers. Most of the digital debris left behind by the rest of us will evince no such interest. Fuller had it half-right: curating the personal archive is a means of understanding ourselves. But it is also a means of having others understand us. The fruits of curation should culminate in presentation. A pile of debris is uninteresting, but when carefully assembled, the insights gleaned from that process can engage an audience.

For the past six years, graphic designer Nicholas Felton has done just that with his Annual Feltron Reports, each a beautifully designed infographic showcase of his life over a year. The things presented in his reports can best be described as minutiae: types of beers consumed, mode and duration of transportation, number of digital and analog photographs taken, etc. Felton’s reports are an Internet sensation, and his claim to fame as a designer. He sells copies through his website, not only to friends, who would naturally be interested in his life, but also to strangers. It is both the data and the presentation that make the Annual Felton Report so compelling. Aesthetically, they are works of art but there remains a fascination with details of daily life.

Since the success of his reports, Felton has created Daytum.com, a website where users input such data from their lives. Infographics in the Felton style are automatically generated, and users can share them with friends. In an interview about his website, Felton says, “I can imagine how counting fireflies over the summer would make a poetic record of the way the summer was spent for an individual, but if 100 or 1,000 people are doing the same thing, does it start to tell an aggregate story that speaks more to global warming or habitat loss?” Felton identifies why collecting and sifting through this data is worthwhile: there is an individual narrative to be found, and these individual narratives add up to a collective one. It would be a shame to allow such signals to drown in the noise, and the act of curation tunes us into the right wavelengths.

The writing of autobiography, which relies on letters and documents, has long had this kind of curatorial role. In his autobiography Speak, Memory, the writer Vladimir Nabokov recounts two intertwined stories: a Russian general showing the young Nabokov a match trick, and years later, Nabokov’s father asking a peasant for a light while sneaking across the Russian border. The peasant lights a match, and Nabokov’s father recognizes him as the same general. “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life,” writes Nabokov, “should be the true purpose of autobiography.” Autobiographies written in the future will surely sift through the digital debris. With a digital memory of near infinite capacity today, it becomes essential to find the matches and generals that make up the designs of our own lives. The fear is not that we forget, but that there is so much we cannot make sense of it.

—Sarah Zhang is a 2010-11 Ledecky Fellow for Harvard Magazine and a Tuesday staff writer.