Very rarely does a story come around that expertly and effortlessly includes the absolute truth of the world. A story that strips the world down only because it never hid behind any of it in the first place. A story that reminds us what is fundamental to our existence, what is both its foundation and what makes it vital. A story that preaches a message that life is not a promise or an order, but a choice.
John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one…Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity, too—in a net of good and evil…. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or evil? Have I done well or ill?”
I honestly do not know where to begin with this one, so I suppose I’ll start with how I began it. I started reading this book leaned over the Good Reads shelf on the second floor of the library, slowly twirling a Julian’s coffee in my hand. I needed to kill time between classes and I remembered that a friend of mine had raved over it (the same friend who recommended I read The Road. Go Claire). A few weeks and a few pieces of tape later (by the time I finished, the faded and torn cover had fallen off), I was dropping it back in the book return, a totally new person.
East of Eden follows two families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, as the characters beautifully and painfully parallel the story of Cain and Abel. Steinbeck takes the story of the first murder and expands it, marooning it in a time just before the Great War, when America is slowly sucking in its breath, both a gesture of divine expectation and of unholy resignation as dry as the farm on which this is manifested. Steinbeck’s characterization is so complete and so full of life that I felt like I was witnessing these characters deal with their respective lives from the place that exists in the very air around them that some call the eyes of God. I honestly do not think that anyone will ever write people as honestly and as dangerously as Steinbeck ever again, and it is an honor just to watch his characters develop into people so familiar that I could swear that I am every single one of them.
“Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy – that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”
I feel like such an egg trying to sum up this masterpiece of a book in an article. Lightly biblical and heavily moral, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is a force of time and of nature that is undeniably true to us all. Because the story of you and I is one of good, evil and the despair and the hope that swirl together in the middle—each totally indistinguishable from the other and entirely their own. As are we all, and as we will always continue to be. Because this story is the only story there is. And it is not promised to us. It is not ordered of us. It is only chosen.
“It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.”