We need a shared language to connect ourselves to one another.

Here, “language” refers to both written and spoken forms of communication through which we discuss anything related to the notion of “aesthetics” mentioned earlier. For example, imagine you are driving along a coastal road. The mist ahead begins to clear, just enough for you to see a distant city. You turn to your friend and say, “I have never seen light refract across buildings like this. It reminds me of a painting by Turner…”

In that moment, you are speaking about aesthetics.

When we speak, we deepen our awareness, our perception, and our thinking. We describe the lived experience of that moment.

The ordinary things we encounter in daily life can arise either from habit without reflection, or from continuous exploration that leads to deliberate, profound understanding. Often, knowing our own rhythms and patterns provides us with a stable sense of everyday life, anchoring our eating, movement, tasks, and the reduction of entropy.

Yet given this, how should we think about the meaning of “changing experience”?

Leonard was once struck by this: what artists choose to say, to explain, and to leave unsaid is often an essential part of artistic creation. He once attempted to “fill the mind of domestic aesthetics with philosophical furniture” as a form of defense, responding to the idea that, as independent individuals, artists and non artists are no different in their interpretations of works or in their ability to produce meaningful insights. However, after undergoing certain turning points in life, he shifted toward constructing what he called “aesthetic landscapes,” believing that only in this way could we more accurately reflect how our minds intersect with the world.

How does the mind intersect with the world?

Life itself remains the same, much like the way sunlight falls upon objects does not change. Yet as we move within it, constantly shifting the positions of things, chain reactions become possible. This is why Tongdi writes on its website that “materials are especially important.” Here, “materials” refers to writing. In fact, writing here points to an abstract connection that begins with material things and extends into thought. It can almost be imagined as a kind of fiber. Writing, as fiber, weaves together two ends, linking the dialogue between people and objects. Because this woven material allows objects, the world, and thought, the mind, to intersect, it becomes “especially important.”

We cannot step into the same beam of light twice. So how can each moment of change be captured?

And what can transform these experiences into something conscious, something transmissible as an idea?

All certainty is merely a temporary scaffold. In the future, there will be no enduring totality waiting for us. This means that we can only rely on description to capture fleeting moments of certainty, bound to a specific time and place. Objects eventually enter into life, and description, or copy, the writing that accompanies them, draws our attention to their qualities, characteristics, and meanings. It reshapes how we imagine them. Through language, we gain the possibility to activate imagination, to form the intention to acquire certain things, and to transform others that are already before us.

Leonard writes that the language we use profoundly shapes how we perceive and engage with the world.

We listen to objects. Through our connections with them, and through the “systems of language” they generate, we recognize one another’s actions, intentions, and trajectories. In this sense, the objects we choose also shape how we understand the world, as well as how we interact with it and with others, including the limits of those interactions. Writing, as a mediating form of description that creates connection, allows the sensibility of experience and the rationality of aesthetics to come together, temporarily, within the language systems of objects and the actions of people.