My God, If evil could walk on two legs with a smile that makes men blind to their own destruction.....
You know when a story just grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go, not because of explosions or dragons or some sci-fi twist, but because it feels like you’re being held hostage inside the souls of the characters? That’s what East of Eden did to my soul. Steinbeck didn’t just write a book, he cracked open human nature, poured it into the soil of Salinas Valley, and said, “Here—watch these people wrestle with good, evil, love, rejection, greed, forgiveness, and all the ugly little shadows that live in us.” And I swear, by the time I finished it, I felt like I had lived five lives, each of them bruised and raw.
The introduction already hits you--it is not a story that hurries. Steinbeck has his time and he sketches Salinas Valley as he is showing you his childhood home. He hangs around its smells, its colors, the touch of the land, nearly venturing to make you feel bored. But you don’t. He is almost preparing a play in which the stage is more significant to the actors. And then you see the characters and you realize that this valley is not a mere background anymore, but the bloodline, the curse, the home, the prison.
And now about the Trasks and the Hamiltons, two families, as unlike each other as they can be, and united by this weird strand of destiny. The patriarch, Cyrus Trask, is a man of discipline and military honor and you immediately sense the conflict between expectation and reality. His sons (Adam and Charles) are the initial insight we have about Steinbeck being obsessed with Cain and Abel. Charles is robust, sensuous, rough, whereas, Adam is tender, cloudy, nearly frail. And keeping the eye on their affair--it is a standing too near the fire. You know that Charles is unfriendly to Adam, you know that Adam is too simple his own good, and when Cyrus is a favorite you can feel the seed of hatred on his lips.
And then there’s Cathy. My God—Cathy. If evil could walk on two legs with a smile that makes men blind to their own destruction. When she appears, you realize that the story will go on its head. She is not a villain, she is a power. Devilish, cold-blooded, soulless near to being inhuman. When she goes to marry Adam, you want to scream, because you see what he does not. And when she gives birth to the twins, Caleb and Aron, and then abandons them to run off into her twisted life as a brothel madam—it’s like Steinbeck took the knife and twisted it.
The twins. Oh, the twins. Aron, a golden boy, pure and dreamy, almost not touched by reality. Caleb is dark, harder, demanding love yet always the shadow, the starved out one. Give me that, that does not sound like any kind of family where one child appears to have the cake and the other the crumbs. I could not see Cal trying to win the affection of his father- it broke me. The scene when he attempts to give Adam the money he earned and Adam refuses it as it is dirty and that that stung like being refused by your own parent. Cal is desperate, human, flawed, he might be any of us. And when Aron discovers the reality of their mother and is unable to cope with it, rushing headfirst into the war that devours him, you can almost foresee it yet it still manages to crack you directly.
However, then there is such a word which Steinbeck continuously returns to, timshel. It means “thou mayest.” Not thou shalt not thou shalt. Thou mayest. It is the concept that each and every one of us makes a choice. It is that good and evil are always sitting in the room with us, and also it is not written in stone which one we choose. That was a sermon in my time. Since it was no longer about the Trasks or the Hamiltons, but about me, and you, and everybody who is wondering whether they are going to be bitten or stand on their feet and make different decisions.
And you know what’s wild? Steinbeck does not do it on the silver platter. He does not spare his characters. Adam is feeble, blind, usually too tender to hear. Cathy is a lost cause so to speak that leaves you wondering whether there are individuals who are born twisted. Cal is a villain, a victim, a sinner and a saint at the same time and you cannot place him in a single category. It seems to be disheveled, it seems half-complete, yet that is precisely what makes it true to life. Because that’s life. Nobody is good and bad and we are always a mixture of both, fighting a war that no one ever notices.
Another of the scenes which have always remained with me is that in which Lee, servant of Adam, the Chinese, comes forward not merely as background, but as one of the wisest voices in the book. It is he who expounds on timshel, it is he who provides us with the anchor on which the entire mass of this sprawling novel is resting. In the absence of Lee, the plot would have been reduced to nothing but tragedy. But with him Steinbeck provides us this glimmer of hope--that even in the worst of the worst in human nature there is the possibility of choice, of redemption.
And that is what made the ending gutted me. Shattered by the death of Aron and all his misfortunes, Adam eventually offers Cal the single thing he has been starving to get- his blessing, his recognition. And yet it is no Hollywood reconciliation. We tell each other, delicate, nearly too late. Still, it’s enough. It is Steinbeck who tells us that love can be selected even at the end, even after all the pain.
Reading East of Eden felt like sitting at the edge of a cliff for 600 pages, waiting to see who would fall and who might fly. It’s a family saga, yes, but it’s also every human story—our jealousies, our longings, our failures, our tiny flashes of grace. It made me angry, it made me ache, it made me stare at the ceiling at 2 a.m. wondering which parts of me are Adam, which are Charles, which are Cathy, and which are Cal. Because if I’m honest, I’ve been all of them at one point or another.
And perhaps that is the true genius of Steinbeck, he did not write merely about good and evil. He wrote about us. He taught me that we hate, we jealous, we unforgivable people with whom we cannot get on. We keep them on our backs, and each day we have to choose whether to turn them into beasts, or to struggle to make them become more than that.
At the end I was no longer reading East of Eden. I was living it. And it made me a raw, weary person, yet with an oddly optimistic feeling. Now, since when timshel is true, then when we say thou mayest, that we can make our choices, then perhaps we are not as damned as we believe.
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