My last column

I will never stop writing. I live as if I were writing everything in my head. That is how I am able to lay out stuff for my other selves to see. That is how I have conversations with my other “me’s” who have studied, read, written, heard, saw and experienced this and that, so I can arrive as clearly as possible to a well-informed understanding of things, even if I know that it will always only be a tentative understanding. Clinically, it sounds like a mental illness, but lucky for me, no one has noticed yet and to them, it is just me writing the columns.

But even if I think that I would be writing for as long as I could, I have always known that the mooring for my writing could shift. That time has come. De Rerum Natura is a column that my husband, Celso Roque, started before he died last June 2002. He wrote 16 weekly columns before he passed on and I assumed authorship right after. Including this last one, I have written a total of 537 columns without having skipped a week in over 10 years. That was not a poor attempt to subtly advertise my tenacity but if any at all, only of my seething curiosity and optimism, to see how a weekly mooring for a science column in a broadsheet, would float in this local sea of readers that has largely never heard of science-writing before.

I could not assume where each of my readers come from in their own minds from but I know where I come from. My own nature yearns to find these nooks and crannies across the science landscape that are so amazing, enthralling, incredible in so many ways, revolutionary and even funny! It was more than enough that I was given the chance to focus and write about things that fire me up and even more, understand a little bit more after having written it.

I don’t write because I think it is going to be part of my legacy. In fact I don’t do anything because I think I am imparting a legacy. This is not because I cannot imagine the future. I just simply do not have the gift for assuming that others will really value my work and thank me for passing it on. That should be their call and not mine. That I have gained readers from all sorts of calling, across time zones who even go out of their way to send me e-mail to say that I have something worthwhile to share, rank up there among the most wonderful of life’s surprises to me (up there with the celebratory realization when I was a kid that when we see stars, we are really seeing the past thousands of years ago and also that when I touch a mimosa plant or “makahiya,” it closes!). To all of you who have read the columns and found that doing so was worth your time, especially to those who even let me know, thank you for the powerful and graceful shots of inspiration you have sent my way. Your feedback elbowed my neurons to high-five each other inspiring me to write more, and hopefully, better pieces.

If anything, I hope the columns taught readers how to think through the claims I write about in my column. I was very deliberate to exclude any of my formal credentials, educational or professional, when I wrote the columns. This is because the column, as it is, should be able to stand on its own, if written well and clearly enough. It should not beg to be nudged by any of the degrees I posses or any weight, if I had any at all, in the writing or the science community. No seemingly impressive credential can make up for a badly written science column. A science column should be “naked,” stripped of any of the author’s accoutrements that have nothing to do with what it is trying to explain. A science column’s gravitas should be judged on its own ability to pull the reader to be interested in the topic it is exploring, raising her heart rate a bit to make her pay attention. It also lies in making the reader understand the topic a bit more than when she started to read it. I am only a science writer worth my salt when I have done that for my readers.

I would like to thank The STAR for hosting De Rerum Natura all these years, for giving me space to cultivate my 10,000 hours to hone my craft. My special gratitude goes to Tony Paño, the editor of the Science and Tech section. I will move on to write a new series of science columns under a new column name in Rappler.com with its own e-mail address for those who would want to continue their exchanges with me. I will retain my De Rerum Natura e-mail ([email protected]) for a year. There are no juicy secrets behind my decision to end De Rerum Natura. It is a science column and not show business or politics, so I do not have the delicious privilege to make stuff up to make myself or my move more interesting than it really is. It is simply time for me and my columns to move on.

To my readers, thank you once again for meeting me in this weekly space for over 10 years. I hope you stay interested in nature and to that ever reliable enterprise that never stops to understand it — science. Once you lock eyes with this way of looking at the world, “beautiful” is a word you will throw around to describe cells, atoms, stars, rocks, celery and popcorn machines. For that really is, as “De Rerum Natura” literally means, the nature of things. Understanding is, indeed, beautiful.

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