"The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there....
"One of the reasons we gave ourselves for this trip--and when we used this reason, we called the trip an expedition--was to observe the distribution of invertebrates, to see and to record their kinds and numbers, how they lived together, what they ate, and how they reproduced. The plan was simple, straight-forward, and only a part of the truth.
But we did tell the truth to ourselves. We were curious.
Our curiosity was not limited, but was as wide and horizonless as that of Darwin or Agassiz or Linnaeus or Pliny. We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality. We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities.
But knowing this, we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality. If it exists at all, it is only available in pickled tatters or in distorted flashes...
"Let us go," we said, "into the Sea of Cortez, 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 the region. We shall take something away from it, be we shall leave something too."
And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance...
"Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn't very important in the world. And six thousand miles away the great bombs are falling on London and the stars are not moved nearby. None of it is important or all of it is...
Introduction to: Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts (1941)
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