The Style Files
My thoughts on design, writing and entrepreneurship.
Photo credit (background): www.pexels.com
Photo credit (background): www.pexels.com
The Myth of Scientific MaterialismLast week, I spoke to an English student who mentioned his background in engineering. He explained it by casually saying anyone could study language but that you have to be smart as an engineer. While I don’t disagree that engineering is difficult, his dismissive attitude towards language is one I’ve heard before. What I cannot understand is how someone belittles something he knows so little about. It’s one thing to dislike reading and another to categorically dump on an enormous and varied group of people. Later in the week, I was enjoying the last few pages of “A Tale for the Time Being” by Ruth Ozeki. (It’s phenomenal and the subject of a previous entry!) Here's one of the passages that caught my eye: “But she had something she wanted to tell us. I think she’d been waiting. She raised her arms and struggled to sit up. I tried to help her, but her body was just bones in a skin bag, and I was afraid to hurt her.” (p. 361) To someone outside of the story, this passage alone means relatively little. Ozeki’s writing is a work of art in its own right as other literary enthusiasts might tell you. To me, the text mainly reminded of similar wording from somewhere else entirely. My friend and her husband took an extended trip years ago involving a couple months of walking and hiking. As the story goes, her husband bought some shoes for their vacay based on branding rather than comfort for feet that felt like “a bag of bones.” That right there is the missing piece: not bags or bones but a fleeting link. The engineer I spoke to might think of words as a means to an end without appreciating their depth or character. How can a few short letters transport me from a contemporary piece of Japanese (or Japanese/American/Canadian) fiction to an anecdote of everyday disappointment? Language connects us to place, time, emotion and nuance. It may be difficult to qualify the value of overlap and connectivity so numbers don’t tell the full story. Ironically, I think this moment is part of a larger discussion. Medicine and physics are both butting heads with anything outside the realm of strict logic or material science. It wasn’t until recently that doctors began to genuinely recognize the mind-body connection or recognize social factors on a person’s health. Physics operates in much the same way: metaphysical theories are gaining traction as our understanding of consciousness is called into question. Will the engineering dude change his mind? Probably not. Still, these examples of colliding perspectives and potential common ground leave me feeling cautiously inspired.
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AuthorHi, my name is Martha Oschwald and I'm a content writer focused on design. This page is meant to give you a taste of my writing style and latest musings. Archives
April 2022
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