The name first.
Galanthus is the snowdrop. A small white flower that comes up through the snow at the end of winter, before anything else dares to.
People have always read the snowdrop as hope. It is the first bloom to push through frozen ground, so for centuries it has meant a new beginning, and the certainty that spring is coming even when nothing around you says so. That is what Gala is to her mother and to me. She arrived, and the season changed.
But I did not choose the flower for the hope. I chose it for how the hope is built. A snowdrop looks fragile and is not. Its cells carry a natural antifreeze, proteins that stop ice crystals from growing large enough to tear the plant apart, so it can freeze on a bad night, bend to the ground, and stand up again in the morning undamaged. The tips of its leaves are hardened into a kind of drill, so it can break through frozen soil that would snap any other stem. It gathers what little warmth there is and melts a small ring of snow around itself to make room. And it does all of this on reserves it stored underground the year before, in a bulb, while everything else was still spending.
That is a portfolio. It is the only kind of portfolio I want to leave her.
Gala, if you read this one day: everything here is for you. The way I invest, the things I refuse to do, the boredom I choose on purpose, all of it is so that what your mother and I built comes through the winter and reaches you. I started writing these because I wanted to leave you something better than a portfolio. A portfolio can be lost. A way of thinking is much harder to lose. These notes are that.
There is a second reason the flower fits, and I found it after I had already chosen it.
The plant that makes you remember
In the Odyssey, Circe drugs Odysseus’s men. The drug makes them forget home. Once they have forgotten, turning them into pigs is easy. Odysseus goes to get them back, and on the way Hermes gives him a plant called moly to eat, so the drug will not work on him. He drinks Circe’s wine, stays himself, and gets his crew back.
In 1983 two neurologists proposed that moly was the snowdrop. The bulb contains galantamine, a compound that blocks exactly the kind of poison Circe is described as using. Today galantamine is a prescription drug for Alzheimer’s. Whether or not Homer had a real flower in mind, the idea is old and the idea is right: the antidote to forgetting is a plant that helps you remember.
I find that useful, because forgetting is the main way people lose money. Every few years the market pours a new wine, and people who knew better forget what they knew. The old papers, the theories that survived, the history of what happened the last time, are the plant. You eat it before you drink the wine. That is why these notes exist: to keep the plant within reach, for Gala and for me.
That is the antidote. It was never about being smarter than Circe, only about remembering where you were going.
Gala: home is the point. Everything else is Circe’s wine.
Federico de Narváez