The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics) Read Online Free Page B

see and know, quoting from William Blake’s “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” that “all that lives is holy.” For Ricketts, the objective was what he called “a creative synthesis,” an “emergent viewpoint,” where by living into the whole one can know “it’s right, it’s alright, the good, the bad, whatever is.”
     
    Ricketts’s doctrine of “breaking through” is the cornerstone of his worldview. And certainly Steinbeck shared his friend’s passion for living deeply, seeing clearly, and viewing life whole. Steinbeck’s work at Hopkins predisposed him to holistic thinking, which he embraced fully, and Blake’s statement that “all that lives is holy” is quoted verbatim by Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath and is the basis for collective action by the Joad family as they move from the “I” to the “we” and become leaders of a movement to empower the lonely and displaced tenant farmers. But for Steinbeck, simply understanding the deep thing, the fundamental unity of life, is essentially a monistic approach that ignores common human needs and so is socially flawed. From Ricketts, Steinbeck learned to see life in scientific terms. His own reading of Ritter, and years of conversations with Ricketts, helped him see life in largely biological terms. Perhaps that is why so many of his most memorable characters are animal-like in thought and action. Tularecito in The Pastures of Heaven, Noah Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, assorted denizens of Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, and, most significantly, Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men, have more in common with what Ricketts called “the good, kind sane little animals” of the intertidal than with physicians or philosophers. But while Steinbeck understood and was sensitive to human weakness, and while he sometimes envied the simple Indians of the Gulf of California—who, as he notes in the Log, may one day have a legend about their northern neighbors, that “great and godlike race that flew away in four-motored bombers to the accompaniment of exploding bombs, the voice of God calling them home”—he was not content to view the world with what he identified as simple “understanding-acceptance.” Rather, for Steinbeck, man is a creature of earth, not a heaven-bound pilgrim, and the writer’s most memorable characters are those who see life whole, and then act on the basis of that understanding, to “break through” to useful and purposeful social action.
     
    The clearest picture of the differences between Steinbeck and Ricketts regarding the proper course of human action for those who can “break through” can be drawn from a short film script Steinbeck wrote during the composition of Sea of Cortez, and an essay Ricketts wrote in response. Steinbeck returned to Mexico for a short time during the summer of 1940 with filmmaker Herb Klein to make a study of disease in an isolated village; this study was made into a well-received documentary entitled The Forgotten Village. The script focuses on the initiative of a young boy, Juan Diego, who is outraged because a deadly microbial virus, which has polluted the village’s water supply and has killed his brother and made his sister seriously ill, is being treated by witch doctors when real medical help is nearby. Juan Diego leaves the village to find the doctors of the Rural Health Service, who return with him to cure the problem. Noting that “changes in people are never quick,” Steinbeck prophesies that, because of the Juan Diegos of Mexico, “the change will come, is coming; the long climb out of darkness. Already the people are learning, changing their lives, working, living in new ways.”
     
    After reading Steinbeck’s text, Ricketts wrote an essay he called his “Thesis and Materials for a Script on Mexico”—actually an antiscript to Steinbeck’s. In it, Ricketts noted that “the chief character in John’s script is the Indian boy who becomes so imbued with the spirit of modern