I'm reading The Two Cultures:and a Second Look by C. P. Snow. Briefly, it describes the "dangerous split that exists between our literary and scientific communities and warns that the West could lose the race in science and technology."
Even reading this blurb on the back cover inspires plenty of dialogue.
I'm definitely humanities oriented: the proverbial child who sat in 3rd grade math class with a novel tucked inside my open math book.
But through some strange twist of fate, I ended up transferring in my junior year to a college that was extremely science-oriented; and that, luckily for me, had a bent toward making science not only understandable--but actually fascinating--to a layman.
By my second year there, I was thinking about becoming a physics major.
However, not being able--by any stretch of the imagination-- to visualize myself spending the
next 40 plus years of my life in a lab coat, I let that idea drop and went on to research the right side of my brain.
I'm half-way through the book. Just starting the section called: "a second look" in which, as Snow explains in the preface (written September 23, 1963), he looks again at his original lecture in the light of various comments and the passage of four years.
This was written 46 years ago--and one consciously reads it with that perspective. It's a thought-provoking look at the direction that the U.S., U.K., and the U.S.S.R. educational systems were going at the inception of the space race.
This is a topic that stirs my imagination and if anyone reading this happens to know of other good writing on this topic, I'd appreciate hearing about it.
I find this topic personally relevant, because within me I've often felt this dichotomy and I imagine that if I could integrate these two pulls within myself, I'd be much farther ahead in all my endeavors.
Several years ago, I fulfilled a long-standing desire to take a portrait drawing class. Throughout my life, I've primarily pursued writing, but have long loved music and visual art.
As I worked with my very patient teacher, trying to get the photograph I was working from down on paper--I was struck by how I felt that what I was doing was basically scientific. The level of acute observation necessary (it was a class in "realistic" drawing) to accurately draw the figure--reminded me of nothing so much as a day in 10th grade chemistry class when my assignment was to watch a test tube into which we had mixed several liquids and I was asked to write down exactly what I saw happening as the two liquids mixed.
Last week, I discovered a family of Canada geese on the pond near my house. I went quickly with camera and notebook in hand to watch the 3 goslings being herded by the 2 parents into the water. Clicking my camera, I captured many photographs, then sat down with my notebook and started drawing what they looked like. Finally, I tried to write down what the geese looked like and describe their activities.
Again, I was drawn back to a memory of 9th grade Biology on a day we went notebooks in hand to a woods across the street from my high school and took notes about the flora and fauna we saw there.
Lately, I've been reading Ellen Bryant Voight's "The Flexible Lyric" and remembering the talk she gave on Frost at the Brattleboro Literary Festival last summer in Vermont.
She talked about Frost's use of the sound "b" in the early lines:
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boys been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
She talked about so much more--another time, if I can locate my notes. But throughout the talk I felt like she was a detective, a scientist, a linguist.
She talked about the "weight" of words and what that did to the line--the effect it had on the emotion of the poem.
This, in turn, reminds me of my art teacher talking to another student in class who was working on an oil painting: "See what effect that has if you put aqua blue next to the ochre; see how the ochre looks different--how it's changed; now put lime green next to it--so how the ochre changes?"
Is this any different than science?
All of this is familiar to anyone who has tried their hand at any of the arts. Learning the technique of sentence structure: learning how an active verb sets off a different reaction than a passive verb. These seem to me to be the skills of a linguist. Albeit, many artists use these techniques instinctively, only to have a critic figure out afterword what makes the piece "work" so well--or, conversely, not work.
But this link between subjective feeling and the objective means to express the emotion, does seem to me to be a real science. As I've understood that physicists feel at the deepest levels of their work they need to draw on "intuition"--sudden leaps of imagination to come up with a new, more elegant theory.
Will we be seeing a coming age of scientist-artists as we used to talk of philosopher-kings?
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