{hundred things} passage 100: Cannery Row
How can the poem and the stink and the grating
noise--the quality of light, the tone, the habit and
the dream--be set down alive? When you collect
marine animals there are certain flat worms so
delicate that they are almost impossible to capture
whole, for they break and tatter under the touch.
You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will
onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into
your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might
be the way to write this book--to open the pages
and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.
Cannery Row
John Steinbeck