Friend of the Fair Oronte Churm has a note on engineers over at The Education of Oronte Churm, "The Engineers Think On It." Eating at a diner with a book of poetry in hand, he posits the engineer's quest for utility--and for order and rationality, it seems--over poetry and spirit (or so my own poetic license has it, from reading his post). I'd say his interpretation is not of any engineers I know, though they do exist in lore and in lonely corners at Virginia Tech.
They had a job to do, but they weren't going to rush it. There was pleasure in the food, companionship, and the pause, but they intended to get back to it. The work they described took neither nature nor the human into account. You were either with them or against them, and they'd be astonished if you were against them.
Sounds like more of a technocratic critique from the glory days of slide rulers than one about engineers today. You should see the style of these U.Va. engineers, for example. Very posh, very Red Wheelbarrow. Says Churm, though:
The engineers got up to leave, and as they ambled out, each loomed for just a second in my light while he tried to read what I was reading. It was a collection by William Carlos Williams.
I looked up, and their faces were puzzled, curious, suspicious. They might have caught just a title or two--"The Flower," "For A Low Voice,"--but no more. These things lacked utility and a guy probably shouldn't think about them, but they did.
I had the image of Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, for some reason. As if the engineers at Churm's diner were the crew working the oil rigs that Nicholson ran to. Of course the scene would be backwards, so I don't know why I flashed to the film -- Nicholson's character was leaving the poetic/musical life for the work-a-day one, not the other way around, as Churm would have it. I guess that's it though -- Churm's view is more about blue collar versus academic, not engineer versus non-engineer.
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