The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics) (46 page)

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Authors: John Steinbeck

BOOK: The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics)
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Our trip to the Gulf of Lower California was a marvel of bumbling efficiency. We went where we intended, got what we wanted, and did the work on it. It had been our intention to continue the work with a survey of the Aleutian chain of islands when the war closed that area to us.
At the time of Ed’s death our plans were completed, tickets bought, containers and collecting equipment ready for a long collecting trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands, which reach so deep into the Pacific Ocean. There was one deep bay with a long and narrow opening where we thought we might observe some changes in animal forms due to a specialized life and a long period of isolation. Ed was to have started within a month and I was to have joined him there. Maybe someone else will study that little island sea. The light has gone out of it for me.
Now I am coming near to the close of this account. I have not put down Ed’s relations with his wives or with his three children. There isn’t time, and besides I did not know much about these things.
As I have said, no one who knew Ed will be satisfied with this account. They will have known innumerable other Eds. I imagine that there were as many Eds as there were friends of Ed. And I wonder whether there can be any parallel thinking on his nature and the reason for his impact on the people who knew him. I wonder whether I can make any kind of generalization that would be satisfactory.
I have tried to isolate and inspect the great talent that was in Ed Ricketts, that made him so loved and needed and makes him so missed now that he is dead. Certainly he was an interesting and charming man, but there was some other quality which far exceeded these. I have thought that it might be his ability to receive, to receive anything from anyone, to receive gracefully and thankfully and to make the gift seem very fine. Because of this everyone felt good in giving to Ed—a present, a thought, anything.
Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver. Nearly always, giving is a selfish pleasure, and in many cases it is a downright destructive and evil thing. One has only to remember some of our wolfish financiers who spend two-thirds of their lives clawing fortunes out of the guts of society and the latter third pushing it back. It is not enough to suppose that their philanthropy is a kind of frightened restitution, or that their natures change when they have enough. Such a nature never has enough and natures do not change that readily. I think that the impulse is the same in both cases. For giving can bring the same sense of superiority as getting does, and philanthropy may be another kind of spiritual avarice.
It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.
It requires a self-esteem to receive—not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.
Once Ed said to me, “For a very long time I didn’t like myself.” It was not said in self-pity but simply as an unfortunate fact. “It was a very difficult time,” he said, “and very painful. I did not like myself for a number of reasons, some of them valid and some of them pure fancy. I would hate to have to go back to that. Then gradually,” he said, “I discovered with surprise and pleasure that a number of people did like me. And I thought, if they can like me, why cannot I like myself? Just thinking it did not do it, but slowly I learned to like myself and then it was all right.”
This was not said in self-love in its bad connotation but in self-knowledge. He meant literally that he had learned to accept and like the person “Ed” as he liked other people. It gave him a great advantage. Most people do not like themselves at all. They distrust themselves, put on masks and pomposities. They quarrel and boast and pretend and are jealous because they do not like themselves. But mostly they do not even know themselves well enough to form a true liking. They cannot see themselves well enough to form a true liking, and since we automatically fear and dislike strangers, we fear and dislike our stranger-selves.
Once Ed was able to like himself he was released from the secret prison of self-contempt. Then he did not have to prove superiority any more by any of the ordinary methods, including giving. He could receive and understand and be truly glad, not competitively glad.
Ed’s gift for receiving made him a great teacher. Children brought shells to him and gave him information about the shells. And they had to learn before they could tell him.
In conversation you found yourself telling him things—thoughts, conjectures, hypotheses—and you found a pleased surprise at yourself for having arrived at something you were not aware that you could think or know. It gave you such a good sense of participation with him that you could present him with this wonder.
Then Ed would say, “Yes, that’s so. That’s the way it might be and besides—” and he would illuminate it but not so that he took it away from you. He simply accepted it.
Although his creativeness lay in receiving, that does not mean that he kept things as property. When you had something from him it was not something that was his that he tore away from himself. When you had a thought from him or a piece of music or twenty dollars or a steak dinner, it was not his—it was yours already, and his was only the head and hand that steadied it in position toward you. For this reason no one was ever cut off from him. Association with him was deep participation with him, never competition.
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.
There it is. That’s all I can set down about Ed Ricketts. I don’t know whether any clear picture has emerged. Thinking back and remembering has not done what I hoped it might. It has not laid the ghost.
The picture that remains is a haunting one. It is the time just before dusk. I can see Ed finishing his work in the laboratory. He covers his instruments and puts his papers away. He rolls down the sleeves of his wool shirt and puts on his old brown coat. I see him go out and get in his beat-up old car and slowly drive away in the evening.
I guess I’ll have that with me all my life.
GLOSSARY
 
OF TERMS AS USED IN THIS WORK
 
ABORAL. The upper surface of a starfish, brittle-star, or sea-urchin, as opposed to the under or oral surface whereon the mouth is situated.
 
ALGAE. Simple plants, often unicellular; the higher forms include the seaweeds.
 
AMBULACRAL GROOVE. A furrow bisecting the underside of the rays of starfish through which the tube feet are protruded.
 
AMPHIPOD. Literally, “paired-legs.” Minute shrimp-like crustaceans, laterally compressed; the beach hoppers, sand fleas, skeleton shrimps, etc.
 
ANASTOMOSING. Dictionary definition: “Union or intercommunication of any system or network of lines, branches, streams, or the like.”
 
ASSOCIATION. An assemblage of animals having ecologically similar requirements.
 
ATOKOUS. The sexually immature stage of certain polychaet worms.
 
AUTONOMY. Reflex, or seemingly voluntary, separation of a part or a limb from the body, followed by regeneration.
 
BUNODID ANEMONE. One of a family of sea-anemones characterized by a bumpy or warty body wall.
 
CALCAREOUS. Containing deposits of calcium carbonate; calcification.
 
CERATA. Dorsal projections which take the place of gills.
 
COMMENSAL. An organism living in, with, or on another, generally partaking of the same food.
 
COSINE WAVE. A wave graphically represented by a curving line, the peaks and troughs of which are equal and complementary.
 
CTENOPHORE. A type of jellyfish characterized by the possession of meridional rows of vibrating plates which propel and orient the animal.
 
DACTYL. Term applied to the last joint of a crustacean leg.
 
DEHISCENCE. A bursting discharge, usually of eggs or sperm.
 
DROWNED CORAL FLAT. A flat containing coral, some heads of which have been suffocated by sand.
 
ECHIUROID. A worm-like animal related to the sipunculids, in which the body is variably sac-like, usually with thin skin, and having often a spoon-shaped proboscis.
 
ECOLOGY. The study of the mutual relations between an organism and its physical and sociological environment.
 
ELYTRA. Shield-like scales of certain worms.
 
ENDEMIC. Dictionary example: “An
endemic disease
is one which is constantly present to a greater or less degree in any place, as distinguished from an
epidemic disease,
which prevails widely at some time, or periodically....”
 
EPITOKOUS. Sexually mature stage in polychaet worms, characterized by changes of the posterior end which enable normally crawling worms to be free-swimming.
 
ETIOLOGY. Dictionary definition: “1. The science, doctrine, or demonstration of causes, especially the investigation of the causes of any disease. 2. The assignment of a cause or reason; as, the
etiology
of a historical custom.”
 
FLORIATE. Flower-like.
 
GASTROPOD. Literally, “stomach-foot.” Belonging to a group of animals comprising the snails, slugs, sea-hares, etc.
 
GYMNOBLAST. Belonging to a group (of hydroids) in which the polyps lack the skeletal cups of other hydroids into which the soft parts can be withdrawn.
 
HOLOTHURIAN. Sea-cucumber. One of a group of echinoderms, or spiny-skinned animals, some varieties of which, under the commercial name
bêche-de-mer
or
trepang,
are used by the Chinese for food.
 
HYDROID. A small, plant-like, usually colonial animal.
 
INTERTIDAL. See
Littoral.
 
INTROVERT. A closed tubular pocket capable of being unrolled and extended inside out.
 
ISOPOD. Literally, “same legs.” Usually small crustaceans in which all the legs are similar, comprising the pill-bugs, sow-bugs, and many marine forms.
 
ISOTHERM. A line joining or marking equal temperatures.
 
LITTORAL. Region of the shore bounded by its highest normal submergence at high tide and most extreme emergence at low tide. Intertidal.
 
MUTATION. In the life history of a species, the sudden appearance of a new trait that breeds true and becomes eventually one of the characters of the species or of the new species thus formed.
 
MYSIDS. Usually minute crustacea, called “opossum shrimps” because of their possession of marsupial plates within which the young develop.
 
NUDIBRANCH. Literally, “naked gill.” One of a group of shell-less gastropods, often brilliantly colored and of delicately beautiful form.
 
OPHIURAN. Brittle-star or serpent-star. Members of one of the five classes of echinoderms or spiny-skinned animals.
 
PAPILLA. Small elevation; in holothurians, modified tube feet not used for locomotion.
 
PELAGIC. Free-floating at or near the surface of the sea.
 
PLANKTON. Generally microscopic plant and animal life floating or weakly swimming in the upper layer of a body of water.
 
POLYCHAETS. Usually elongate worms characterized by the possession of abundant chaetae or bristles.
 
POLYCLADS. Flatworms in which the intestinal tract has extensive ramifications.
 
POLYP. An invertebrate having a hollow cylindrical body, closed and attached at one end and opening at the other by a central mouth surrounded by tentacles. May be an individual (as an anemone) or a member of a colony (as a coral polyp).
 
PORCELLANIDS. Crabs of the family Porcellanidae, often called porcelain crabs because of the carapace texture of typical examples.
 
QUATERNARY, OR RECENT. The latest of the epochs into which geologists divide the history of the earth. Late Quaternary includes the present time.
 
RESPIRATORY TREE. The respiratory organ of holothurians; so named because it resembles a tree inside out. Fresh water is taken in at what corresponds to the trunk and penetrates to the delicate branches, which provide great absorption area in proportion to the volume.

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