The person who recommended me the book hates this chapter. But to me, it's a beautiful exercise in painting a picture with words: How can you not want to travel to Cali and roll around in the Salinas fields after reading that?Not at all. The man starts East of Eden with a chapter that does nothing but set up the Salinas Valley. The effect is to cast the rest of the book in a perpetual Magic Hour - everything limned in alpenglow, a soft focus filter over life.
Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of poppies.