Books

Okay, so Steinbeck quotes it is. Yes, he wrote beautiful novels, but he was also a glorious non-fiction writer.

In his intro to The Log from the Sea of Cortez, he writes about his desire for the book—that their observation of objective facts be tempered with an even larger truth of individual experience and meaning.

Code4rena.com co-founder. Securityalliance.org contributor. Lover of books, poetry, collective knowledge graphs, and aligning on a big vision.

“We said, ‘Let’s go wide open. Let’s see what we see, record what we find, and not fool ourselves with conventional scientific strictures. We could not observe a completely objective Sea of Cortez anyway, for in that lonely and uninhabited Gulf our boat and ourselves would change it the moment we entered.’”

“Let us go...realizing that we become forever a part of it; that our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eel-grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of that region. We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too.”

I just love this perspective Steinbeck brings, not just to this book, but to non-fiction writing in general. Only a brilliant novelist could hold both the factual and the invisible in both hands, and write about them with equal weight, as if they are the same thing.