That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write. You will become a scientist, if not of the natural world than of whatever world you care about. More of that world will pop alive. You will see more when you look at it.
Writing makes you live more curiously.
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.
Making the case for writing in that it changes how you look at the world.
when we experience pain or where we when we see someone else in pain, our brain activates similar brain regions and that's how we refer to empathy.
for - empathy - neuroscience of - observing pain in others - triggers activations in same brain region as when we experience pain ourselves - observed across species
Kang dén ilo, lawan kang ngilo puniku, anapon wayangngan anané kang ngilo pasthi, iya iku tannana prabédanira.
How much that is hidden may still reside in a person, or how much may still reside hidden! How inventive is hidden inwardness in hiding itself and in deceiving or evading others, the hidden inwardness that preferred that no one would suspect its existence, modestly afraid of being seen and mortally afraid of being entirely disclosed! Is it not so that the one person never completely understands the other? But if he does not understand him completely, then of course it is always possible that the most indisputable thing could still have a completely different explanation that would, note well, be the true explanation, since an assumption can indeed explain a great number of instances very well and thereby confirm its truth and yet show itself to be untrue as soon as the instance comes along that it cannot explain-and it would indeed be possible that this instance or this somewhat more precise specification could come even at the last moment. Therefore all calm and, in the intellectual sense, dispassionate observers, who eminently know how to delve searchingly and penetratingly into the inner being, these very people judge with such infinite caution or refrain from it entirely because, enriched by observation, they have a developed conception of the enigmatic world of the hidden, and because as observers they have learned to rule over their passions. Only superficial, impetuous passionate people, who do not understand themselves and for that reason naturally are unaware that they do not know others, judge precipitously. Those with insight, those who know never do this. Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, (1847) Hong 1995 p. 228-229
This section particularly interests me, this is more or less how my brain operates, the trains of thought, the natural inclination to analyze life by thinking, thinking of others, assumptions I make, others make. What is the truth? Is there a truth?
Down the ravine
Wright never allows us to forget how the imagery is coming to him and no one else. He is the intermediary. He sees. He hears. He observes.
This means participating in activities, asking questions,
Anthropologists actually go to where people live and do fieldwork. They experience first hand the culture and traditions.