I will preface this entire post by saying that I have verry verry bad dyslexia. it was so bad when I was younger that I didn’t really learn how to read until I was 8 or 9 years old. but once I learned- there was no stopping me.
After learning how to read came written language. This was even more difficult for me. I was pushed to the back of classrooms so that I wouldn’t distract from the lesson (I asked too many questions, and other people’s handwriting is near indecipherable to me), and then I was pushed into a small room where they taught me to recite poetry thinking that it would help me become a better english student. My family used to laugh at me when I would tell them that I wanted to be a writer. My sister used to say that I could barely stitch together coherent sentences and that anything I could churn out would be more vowel than word (for those of you who don’t have dyslexia a’s o’s and u’s look very very similar- I confuse them with c’s o’s g’s and q’s).
Compared to the torture of english classes,( classes where people couldn’t read my essays because they defined them as “unreadable”) science classes where a blessing. Science is observable and relatively concrete. Science class for me, was where you could look at the outside world, observe, and regurgitate your observations them without mixing up the letters b and d. Science class was where there was only one essay to write every year (and thank god for spell check in those hours before it was due). english has always been the thing that I have loved and yet struggled with- and science has always been my prefered subject- or as I like to think of it as- my “first” language. I think it came as somewhat of a relief too my family when I told them I wanted to go into a scientific field rather than pursue creative writing, or any english in general when I went to college.
That, unfortunately, was a lie.
I am still very much in love with the way that you can string words together and this does not detract from the way that i find beauty in the ways that science is constantly trying to redefine our world.
in interdisciplinarity by Joe Moran, he states that “the long standing division between the humanities and the sciences remains a resilient obstacle to interdisciplinary study, but is still capable of being challenged” (page 134). As both a Scientist and a bibliophile, I challenge the idea that there is a division at all between the two subjects. Science relies on fact while literature relies on concrete words from other writers- or on concrete feelings from the writer themselves. I would not say that science and literature are two sides of the same coin however because then there would be an edge between them. But perhaps we should think of them as a rolling sphere. dependant on each other but unaware that that dependency exists at all. without words could scientists describe to others what they had discovered? and without science could writers describe the world that they walk through and absorb it like ink pressed between page and pen?
This past summer I told my parents that I was considering double majoring in geology and english. And too my surprise my mother replied. “Maybe you can be the bridge between the two- you know, make the other understand why they need the other” and too that I replied. “maybe.”
maybe.