“The Boat-Shaped Mind”

In “The Log from the Sea of Cortez,” published in 1951, John Steinbeck writes about a six-week boat expedition he made in 1940, gathering marine specimens along the Gulf of California. In an excerpt recently re-published online, Steinbeck pondered the connection of humans to boats. “How deep this thing must be,” he wrote, “the giver and the receiver again; the boat designed through millennia 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.” Read more of “The Boat-Shaped Mind” via Lapham’s Quarterly.