"It's so ugly."
In 1945, John Steinbeck turned a sardine-stinking neighborhood of alcoholism, prostitution, and homelessness into a place you wished you lived.
The way he did it will change your life.
Steinbeck set his novel “Cannery Row” in Monterey, California during the Great Depression. It follows a group of people — many lifelong derelicts and ne'er-do-wells — through their adventures in a district lined with fish canneries.
Here’s how Steinbeck starts the book:
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stench, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."
A poem. A quality of light. A nostalgia. A dream.
If you were to stumble across Cannery Row in the late 1920s, you’d think a few things.
“This quality of light makes me want to find help.”
“I’m nostalgic for a time and place that isn’t right here and right now.”
“This feels like such a nightmare, I’m having a hard time remembering what dreams are.”
You would’ve found yourself on a dark, dank street reeking of oily fish and littered with cans of urban tumbleweed, checking over your shoulder to make sure the hardships that seeped into its residents didn’t leech onto you.
And Steinbeck called it a poem. A quality of light. A nostalgia. A dream.
The best writers have an uncanny ability to turn the ugly and the mundane into the beautiful and the inspiring.
And it’s not because they’re good with words. It’s because they’re masters of perception.
In “Lila,” Marilynne Robinson writes:
“The fields were tenderly overrun by life, the plow was healing in the furrow, and the corn was humble before God."
She was describing a cornfield in Iowa.
In “The Remains of the Day,” Kazuo Ishiguro says:
“The English landscape at its finest—such as I saw this morning—possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess. It is … greatness.”
He was talking about some hills in England.
In “Desert Solitaire,” it’s Edward Abbey:
"The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow."
This is his takeaway from staring at Utah’s hot, dry, barren Moab desert.
But often when we visit these places, we see corn. Some hills. A desert. We talk about how we wish we were near the mountains or in the woods or by the sea.
But these writers — these masters of perception — saw the same things we see. And they unearthed the beauty so well that we long to see those scenes, not acknowledging that we see similarly captivating places and people every day.
Beauty is not a law of nature. It is not a physical characteristic.
It’s a perception.
And it’s your responsibility to find it.