SWMM56

Everyone Should Write Says  James Somers: You should write because when you know that you’re  going  to write, it changes the way you live. I’m thinking about a book I read called  Field Notes on Science & Nature , a collection of essays by scientists about their notes. It’s hard to imagine a more tedious concept — a book of essays about  notes ? — but in execution it was wonderful. What it teaches you, over and over again, is that the difference between you and a zoologist or you and a botanist is that the botanist, when she looks at a flower, has a question in mind. She’s trying to  generate  questions. For her the flower is the locus of many mental threads, some nascent, some spanning her career. Her field notebook is not some convenient way to store lifeless data to be presented in lifeless papers so that other scientists can replicate some dull experiment; it’s the site of a collision between a mind and a world. More interesting insight: When ...