I used to think nothing of writing but that it was enabled by tools; tools that time would nullify the writer’s monopoly of. I was degraded by the sensation that technology would make writers of us all.
Then I realized that writing required one to hold on to an idea for a long stretch and to maintain an indirect focus on it such that he would be able to keep aiming at it while dealing with many other more proximal things all at once- to create a coherent whole out of many disparate parts and pieces. In order to succeed, he would have to weave with a common thread. It was then that I saw clarified that which lies distinctly within the writer’s purview: a sense of how things might plausibly coalesce into a regress of causes. The greatness of the written work must be judged on a scale whose relevant units are degrees of understanding and articulation of an ever larger picture encompassing it all. I suspected that great writers throughout time had established great appreciation across many contexts; had created a framework within which every piece of knowledge they acquired fit. Obviously, this necessitated that the framework be flexible, that it be capable of accommodating needed changes as new information was incorporated that disrupted the compatibility of old ideas of how it all fit together. This is the essence of what sets the scientific mind at odds with other paradigms, that all must fit together and that when two ideas are held that both seem valid but are set at odds with one another, the substance of one must change lest both be invalidated, since both cannot be true at the same time. Such are the dictates of a principled and properly characterized scientific mind.
Then I realized that writing required one to hold on to an idea for a long stretch and to maintain an indirect focus on it such that he would be able to keep aiming at it while dealing with many other more proximal things all at once- to create a coherent whole out of many disparate parts and pieces. In order to succeed, he would have to weave with a common thread. It was then that I saw clarified that which lies distinctly within the writer’s purview: a sense of how things might plausibly coalesce into a regress of causes. The greatness of the written work must be judged on a scale whose relevant units are degrees of understanding and articulation of an ever larger picture encompassing it all. I suspected that great writers throughout time had established great appreciation across many contexts; had created a framework within which every piece of knowledge they acquired fit. Obviously, this necessitated that the framework be flexible, that it be capable of accommodating needed changes as new information was incorporated that disrupted the compatibility of old ideas of how it all fit together. This is the essence of what sets the scientific mind at odds with other paradigms, that all must fit together and that when two ideas are held that both seem valid but are set at odds with one another, the substance of one must change lest both be invalidated, since both cannot be true at the same time. Such are the dictates of a principled and properly characterized scientific mind.
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