I am re-reading, with immense satisfaction, John Steinbeck's 1952 bestseller, East of Eden. I first read it as a college freshman, not for coursework, but as a stolen guilty pleasure inbetween classes and softball practices, which in those comparatively unregulated NCAA days took place during the mornings as well as the afternoons, even during the offseason. I bought a used but clean copy of East of Eden along with a battered, crumbling copy of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, at Moe's Books, Berkeley's exceptional answer to impoverished reading gluttons such as my then eighteen-year-old self. Eighteen years later, I remembered virtually nothing about the novel except that I had adored it. So, casting about for something that could stand up to being read after Capote's mesmerizing Grass Harp, I picked up East of Eden again. Now seemed like a good time to try to remember what all the fuss was about the first time around.

The fuss was right. East of Eden is a phenomenal novel--part genealogy (the Hamilton family is Steinbeck's mother Olive's family), part allegory (the Trask family are Steinbeck's "symbol people," shaped around the story of Cain and Abel). Steinbeck called the novel an autobiography of the Salinas Valley, where his Irish famine immigrant grandfather farmed and blacksmithed and where he himself grew up. "In a sense it will be two books," he wrote; "the story of my country and the story of me." He wrote the novel in large part for his sons, part family history, part mythography, part turning family history into myth. And he was prouder of it than of anything else he had ever written--including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Grapes of Wrath. He called East of Eden ìThe big one as far as I'm concerned," noting that "Always before I held something back for later. Nothing is held back here.î From the moment he began work on the novel, he knew it would be his great moment of synthesis: "It is what I have been practicing to write all of my life," he wrote in 1948. Three years later, after he had completed East of Eden, he still felt that the book was, in a sense, his moment of literary arrival: "This is 'the book'...Always I had this book waiting to be written."

It's not surprising, then, that Steinbeck occasionally departs from the plot to indulge in philosophical reflection. Clearly he saw it as his epic duty--not to mention the duty of the type of epic East of Eden would be--to do just this. I was particularly taken by the mini-essay with which he opens Chapter 13, and thought I would reproduce it here. It runs thus:

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then - the glory - so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.

At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on the preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

I read the Reader's Digest Condensed Version as a teenager, and loved it. I absolutely insist on a plot in the books I read, and boy, has that sucker got plot. Maybe the Cain v. Abel archetypes were a bit overdone.

I still remember the cheesy cover on the paperback when I read it back in high school.

And I still remember "timshel."

Crap, as if I don't already have enough on my reading list? Damn you inkbloggers - damn you.

My mother calls East of Eden her "secular Bible", in some part, I think, because of passages such as the one you excerpted. When as a kid I asked her to elaborate, though, she shook her head slightly and always said it was up to me to find what she meant.

this book touched my life. ive never read anything like it before... it's a masterpiece.
what's so beautiful about it is the author's style, humor, intelligence, profoundity. of course the story itself, the characters. you just have to find out for yourself.
you have to. if i have to command you to read it, ill do so. then later you can thank me.
reading it is one of the best experiences you can ever have.

I think East of Eden is a long... but satisfying book, my favorite character is Cathy. She is so ungodly and evil that she fascinates me, one day I think it might be cool to meet a person like her.. only kidding!