An essay is not a scientific document. It can be serendipitous or domestic, satire or testimony, tongue-in-cheek or wail of grief. Mulched perhaps in its own contradictions, it promises no sure objectivity, just the condiment of opinion on a base of observation and sometimes such leaps of illogic or superlogic that they may work a bit like magic realism in a novel: namely to simulate the mind's own processes in a murkey and incongruous world. More than being instructive, as a magazine article is, an essay has a slant, a seasoned personality behind it that ought to weather well. Even if we think the author is telling the earth is flat, we might want to listen to him elaborate upon the fringes of his premise because the bristle of his narrative and what he's seen intrigues us. He has a cutting edge, yet balance too. A given body of information is going to be eclipsed, but what lives in art is spirit, not factuality, and we respond to Montaigne's human touch despite four centuries of technological and social change. -Edward Hoagland
Something I found interestingly true, is what Ed said about an essay potenitally being completely bogus, but the reader will still look at it like it's a valid truth. Now of course, after the writer states his opinions, the reader will process what is truth and what isn't. It's a certain curiosity that drives reader's to actually read what writers have to say, whether it be completely "bogus" or truthful. Ed's thesis that essays are not scientific documents could be contradicted due to the fact that science is based on opinions being proven right and wrong. Supporting that essays can be like scientific documents, science is truths being sought by individuals. So the question being, where do people start to find these truths? Imagination can be a factor, but I would say mainly science is found by someone's opinion being proven to be correct or incorrect through trial and error. Also, an essay can be completely remote from any sort of scientific reasoning. Scientific documents are not fiction, that's a whole different category. A person can write about fictional characters, which are not scientific. Essays are generally more composed from the human spirit rather than literal reality. I had to read this excerpt multiple times to fully understand what Ed was really trying to get across to his readers. But in the end, it all makes sense to me. An essay doesn't really tell a person much, other than the writer's point-of-view or their own state of being. I think it's because of the fact that essays are not as "concrete" as science is, that you can't really put science and essays in the same category. There's a certain aspect of science that could be set in the same light as an essay, being that there's no real evidence other than the writers knowledge and opinion. Scientists perform a "type" of essay when they're stating a hypothesis. They don't have real evidence yet, it's their own "guess" of what will happen. That's the only way I can think that science and essays could be linked together.
