This endless race with time, this preference for desire over enjoyment is not without its drawbacks. Too often, it prevents us from understanding, and nurtures the illusion of life rather than life itself. It took me a long time to realize that this drive toward tomorrow has an advantage in at least one domain: in research. Late, very late, I discovered the true nature of science, of how it proceeds, of the men who do it. I came to understand that, contrary to what I had believed, the march of science does not consist in a series of inevitable conquests, or advance along the royal road of human reason, or result necessarily and inevitably from conclusive observations dictated by experiment and argumentation. I found in science a mode of playfulness and imagination, of obsessions and fixed Ideas. To my surprise, those who achieved the unexpected and invented the possible were not simply men of learning and method. More than anything else, they possessed extraordinary minds, enjoyed the difficult, and often were creatures of amazing vision. Those In the front ranks displayed exotic blends of passion and indifference, of rigor and whimsy, of naïveté and the will to power, in a triumph of individuality.
