The Log from the Sea of Cortez

by John Steinbeck

There is an “idea” boat that is an emotion, and because the emotion is so strong it is probable that no other tool is made with so much honesty as a boat. Bad boats are built, surely, but not many of them. It can be argued that a bad boat cannot survive tide and wave and hence is not worth building, but the same might be said of a bad automobile on a rough road. Apparently the builder of a boat acts under a compulsion greater than himself. Ribs are strong by definition and feeling. Keels are sound, planking truly chosen and set. A man builds the best of himself into a boat—builds many of the unconscious memories of his ancestors. Once, passing the boat department of Macy’s in New York, where there are duck-boats and skiffs and little cruisers, one of the authors discovered that as he passed each hull he knocked on it sharply with his knuckles. He wondered why he did it, and as he wondered, he heard a knocking behind him, and another man was rapping the hulls with his knuckles, the same tempo—three sharp knocks on each hull. During an hour’s observation there no man or boy and few women passed who did not do

giver and the receiver again; the boat designed through millenniums of trial and error by the human consciousness, the boat which has no counterpart in nature unless it be a dry leaf fallen by accident in a stream. And Man receiving back from Boat a warping of his psyche so that the sight of a boat riding in the water clenches a fist of emotion in his chest. A horse, a beautiful dog, arouses sometimes a quick emotion, but of inanimate things only a boat can do it. And a boat, above all other inanimate things, is personified in man’s mind. When

This is not mysticism, but identification; man, building this greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boat-shaped mind, and the boat, a man-shaped soul. His spirit and the tendrils of his feeling are so deep in a boat that the identification is complete.

Only the trait of murder which our species seems to have could allow us the sick, exultant sadness of sinking a ship, for we can murder the things we love best, which are, of course, ourselves.

And perhaps our species is not likely to forgo war without some psychic mutation which at present, at least, does not seem imminent. And if one place the blame for killing and destroying on economic insecurity, on inequality, on injustice, he is simply stating the proposition in another way. We have what we are. Perhaps the crayfish feels the itch of jealousy, or perhaps he is sexually insecure. The effect is that he fights. When in the world there shall come twenty, thirty, fifty years without evidence of our murder trait, under whatever system of justice or economic security, then we may have a contrasting habit pattern to examine. So far there is no such situation. So far the murder trait of our species is as regular and observable as our various sexual habits.

The moment or hour of leave-taking is one of the pleasantest times in human experience, for it has in it a warm sadness without loss. People who don’t ordinarily like you very well are overcome with affection at leave-taking. We said good-by again and again and still could not bring ourselves to cast off the lines and start the engines. It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be missed without being gone; to be loved without satiety. How beautiful one is and how desirable; for in a few moments one will have ceased to exist.

The true biologist deals with life, with teeming boisterous life, and learns something from it, learns that the first rule of life is living.

Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers.

Pelicans seem always to know exactly where they are going.

Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans.

For the ocean, deep and black in the depths, is like the low dark levels of our minds in which the dream symbols incubate and sometimes rise up to sight like the Old Man of the Sea. And even if the symbol vision be horrible, it is there and it is ours. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.

What we have wanted always is an unchangeable, and we have found that only a compass point, a thought, an individual ideal, does not change—

We wonder whether in the present pattern the pieces are not straining to fall out of line; whether the paradoxes of our times are not finally mounting to a conclusion of ridiculousness that will make the whole structure collapse. For the paradoxes are becoming so great that leaders of people must be less and less intelligent to stand their own leadership.

They were like the men and women who stand about airports and railroad stations; they want to go away, and most of all they want to go away from themselves. For they do not know that they would carry their globes of boredom with them wherever they went.

More likely a name emerges almost automatically from a place as well as from a man and the relationship between name and thing is very close.

It is amazing how the strictures of the old teleologies infect our observation, causal thinking warped by hope. It was said earlier that hope is a diagnostic human trait, and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe. For hope implies a change from a present bad condition to a future better one. The slave hopes for freedom, the weary man for rest, the hungry for food. And the feeders of hope, economic and religious, have from these simple strivings of dissatisfaction managed to create a world picture which is very hard to escape. Man grows toward perfection; animals grow toward man; bad grows toward good; and down toward up, until our little mechanism, hope, achieved in ourselves probably to cushion the shock of thought, manages to warp our whole world. Probably when our species developed the trick of memory and with it the counterbalancing projection called “the future,” this shock-absorber, hope, had to be included in the series, else the species would have destroyed itself in despair. For if ever any man were deeply and unconsciously sure that his future would be no better than his past, he might deeply wish to cease to live. And out of this therapeutic poultice we build our iron teleologies and twist the tide pools and the stars into the pattern.

To most men the most hateful statement possible is, “A thing is because it is.” Even those who have managed to drop the leading-strings of a Sunday-school deity are still led by the unconscious teleology of their developed trick. And in saying that hope cushions the shock of experience, that one trait balances the directionalism of another, a teleology is implied, unless one know or feel or think that we are here, and that without this balance, hope, our species in its blind mutation might have joined many, many others in extinction.

Man is the only animal whose interest and whose drive are outside himself. Other animals may dig holes to live in; may weave nests or take possession of hollow trees. Some species, like bees or spiders, even create complicated homes, but they do it with the fluids and processes of their own bodies. They make little impression on the world. But the world is furrowed and cut, torn and blasted by man. Its flora has been swept away and changed; its mountains torn down by man; its flat lands littered by the debris of his living. And these changes have been wrought, not because any inherent technical ability has demanded them, but because his desire has created that technical ability. Physiological man does not require this paraphernalia to exist, but the whole man does. He is the only animal who lives outside of himself, whose drive is in external things—property, houses, money, concepts of power. He lives in his cities and his factories, in his business and job and art. But having projected himself into these external complexities, he is them. His house, his automobile are a part of him and a large part of him.

The routine of changing domination is a case in point. One can think of the attached and dominant human who has captured the place, the property, and the security. He dominates his area. To protect it, he has police who know him and who are dependent on him for a living. He is protected by good clothing, good houses, and good food. He is protected even against illness. One would say that he is safe, that he would have many children, and that his seed would in a short time litter the world. But in his fight for dominance he has pushed out others of his species who were not so fit to dominate, and perhaps these have become wanderers, improperly clothed, ill fed, having no security and no fixed base. These should really perish, but the reverse seems true. The dominant human, in his security, grows soft and fearful. He spends a great part of his time in protecting himself. Far from reproducing rapidly, he has fewer children, and the ones he does have are ill protected inside themselves because so thoroughly protected from without. The lean and hungry grow strong, and the strongest of them are selected out. Having nothing to lose and all to gain, these selected hungry and rapacious ones develop attack rather than defense techniques, and become strong in them, so that one day the dominant man is eliminated and the strong and hungry wanderer takes his place.

There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad; not changing things, but generally considered good and bad throughout the ages and throughout the species. Of the good, we think always of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success.

Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness.

It is said so often and in such ignorance that Mexicans are contented, happy people. “They don’t want anything.” This, of course, is not a description of the happiness of Mexicans, but of the unhappiness of the person who says it. For Americans, and probably all northern peoples, are all masses of wants growing out of inner insecurity.

Boredom arises not so often from too little to think about, as from too much, and none of it clear nor clean nor simple.

search for something that will seem like truth to us; we search for understanding; we search for that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life; we search for the relations of things, one to another, as this young man searches for a warm light in his wife’s eyes and that one for the hot warmth of fighting. These little boys and young men on the tide flat do not even know

For it is through struggle and sorrow that people are able to participate in one another—the heartlessness of the healthy, well-fed, and unsorrowful person has in it an infinite smugness.

“cornuda” was the hammer-head shark; “barco,” the red snapper; “caracol,” and also “burral,” all snails in general, but particularly the large conch. Urchins were called “erizo” and sea-fans, “abanico.” “Bromas” were barnacles and “hacha” the pinna, or large clam.

Thus, beliefs persist long after their factual bases have been removed, and practices based on beliefs are often carried on even when the beliefs which stimulated them have been forgotten.

The things of our minds have for us a greater toughness than external reality.

For in some beastly way this fine laziness has got itself a bad name. It is easy to see how it might have come into disrepute, if the result of laziness were hunger. But it rarely is. Hunger makes laziness impossible. It has even become sinful to be lazy. We wonder why. One could argue, particularly if one had a gift for laziness, that it is a relaxation pregnant of activity, a sense of rest from which directed effort may arise, whereas most busy-ness is merely a kind of nervous tic. We know a lady who is obsessed with

How can such a process have become a shame and a sin? Only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighing of oneself against the world and the world against itself. A busy man cannot find time for such balancing. We do not think a lazy man can commit murders, nor great thefts, nor lead a mob. He would be more likely to think about it and laugh. And a nation of lazy contemplative men would be incapable of fighting a war unless their very laziness were attacked. Wars are the activities of busy-ness.

A number of times we were asked, Why do you do this thing, this picking up and pickling of little animals? To our own people we could have said any one of a number of meaningless things, which by sanction have been accepted as meaningful. We could have said, “We wish to fill in certain gaps in the knowledge of the Gulf fauna.” That would have satisfied our people, for knowledge is a sacred thing, not to be questioned or even inspected. But the Indian might say, “What good is this knowledge? Since you make a duty of it, what is its purpose?” We could have told our people the usual thing about the advancement of science, and again we would not have been questioned further. But the Indian might ask, “Is it advancing, and toward what? Or is it merely becoming complicated? You save the lives of children for a world that does not love them. It is our practice,” the Indian might say, “to build a house before we move into it. We would not want a child to escape pneumonia, only to be hurt all its life.” The lies we tell about our duty and our purposes, the meaningless words of science and philosophy, are walls that topple before a bewildered little “why.” Finally, we learned to know why we did these things. The animals were very beautiful. Here was life from which we borrowed life and excitement. In other words, we did these things because it was pleasant to do them.

And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.

Perhaps the pattern of struggle is so deeply imprinted in the genes of all life conceived in this benevolently hostile planet that the removal of obstacles automatically atrophies a survival drive.

We in the United States have done so much to destroy our own resources, our timber, our land, our fishes, that we should be taken as a horrible example and our methods avoided by any government and people enlightened enough to envision a continuing economy. With our own resources we have been prodigal, and our country will not soon lose the scars of our grasping stupidity.

Ideas are not dangerous unless they find seeding place in some earth more profound than the mind. Leaders and would-be leaders are so afraid that the idea “communism” or the idea “Fascism” may lead to revolt, when actually they are ineffective without the black earth of discontent to grow in. The strike-raddled business-man may lean toward strikeless Fascism, forgetting that it also eliminates him. The rebel may yearn violently for the freedom from capitalist domination expected in a workers’ state, and ignore the fact that such a state is free from rebels. In each case the idea is dangerous only when planted in unease and disquietude. But being so planted, growing in such earth, it ceases to be idea and becomes emotion and then religion. Then, as in most things teleologically approached, the wrong end of the animal is attacked.

Lucretius, striking at the teleology of his time, was not so far from us. “I shall untangle by what power the steersman nature guides the sun’s courses, and the meanderings of the moon, lest we, percase, should fancy that of own free will they circle their perennial courses round, timing their motions for increase of crops and

Why do we so dread to think of our species as a species? Can it be that we are afraid of what we may find? That human self-love would suffer too much and that the image of God might prove to be a mask? This could be only partly true, for if we could cease to wear the image of a kindly, bearded, interstellar dictator, we might find ourselves true images of his kingdom, our eyes the nebulae, and universes in our cells.

The safety-valve of all speculation is: It might be so. And as long as that might remains, a variable deeply understood, then speculation does not easily become dogma, but remains the fluid creative thing it might be. Thus, a valid painter, letting color and line, observed, sift into his eyes, up the nerve trunks, and mix well with his experience before it flows down his hand to the canvas, has made his painting say, “It might be so.” Perhaps his critic, being not so honest and not so wise, will say, “It is not so. The picture is damned.” If this critic could say, “It is not so with me, but that might be because my mind and experience are not identical with those of the painter,” that critic would be the better critic for it, just as that painter is a better painter for knowing he himself is in the pigment.

It was always my conviction—or better, my impression—that the legal system was designed to arrive at the truth in matters of human and property relationships. You see, I had forgotten or never considered one thing. Each side wants to win, and that factor warps any original intent to the extent that the objective truth of the matter disappears in emphasis.

But opposition is creative and restriction is non-creative. The force that feeds growth is therefore cut off. Now, the tendency to integration must constantly increase. And this process of integration must destroy all tendencies toward improvisation, must destroy the habit of creation, since this is sand in the bearings of the system. The system then must, if our speculation is accurate, grind to a slow and heavy stop. Thought and art must be forced to disappear and a weighty traditionalism take its place. Thus we would play with thinking. A too greatly integrated system or society is in danger of destruction since the removal of one unit may cripple the whole.

Consider the blundering anarchic system of the United States, the stupidity of some of its lawmakers, the violent reaction, the slowness of its ability to change. Twenty-five key men destroyed could make the Soviet Union stagger, but we could lose our congress, our president, and our general staff and nothing much would have happened. We would go right on. In fact we might be better for it. That is an example of the game we played. Always our thinking was prefaced with, “It might be so!” Often a whole night would draw down to a moment while we pursued the fireflies of our

“Adults, in their dealing with children, are insane,” he said. “And children know it too. Adults lay down rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet they expect children to obey the rules, believe the truths, and admire and respect their parents for this nonsense. Children must be very wise and secret to tolerate adults at all.

For giving can bring the same sense of superiority as getting does, and philanthropy may be another kind of spiritual avarice.

I wish we could all be so. If we could learn even a little to like ourselves, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away. Maybe we would not have to hurt one another just to keep our ego-chins above water.