coldhearted scientist وداد

Here is an interesting meme post that I cannibalized into a meme: books and projects that interested you before high school. (The original post is much more specific, since its question is what book or experience made one into an intellectual; here I answer that question and say more things.)

My intellectual question while I was acquiring my first language, English, was on the relationship between language and thought. It appeared to me that the acquisition of language was sharpening my mind in certain specific ways, but that I was also losing contact with an entire sensorial world to which I had once had immediate access. (I believe it is my memory of this access which enables me to acquire systems, languages, cultures, as quickly as I do even now.) In any case my question was Whorfian: did thought precede language, or did language form thought? I wanted to believe the former, but I feared the latter was more true. This is why I wanted to do the Ph.D; it was also an important reason why I wanted to acquire additional languages.

Notice how scientifically oriented I am.

Non children’s authors I read very early on and that made a strong enough impression upon me that they fly immediately into mind are James Baldwin and Erich Fromm. Topics of school projects were the Incas, the Panama Canal, the Russian revolution, witchcraft in the Middle Ages, and African-American literature. That last was my first true research project, since I had to find and read primary texts — some of which were brand new at the time, and some of which were quite old and required minor archival work to find.

My interests have not changed a great deal.

Axé.