East of Eden

You can see how this book has reached a great boundary that was called 1900. Another hundred years were ground up and churned, and what had happened was all muddled by the way folks wanted it to be--more rich and meaningful the farther back it was. In the books of some memories it was the best time that ever sloshed over the world--the old time, the gay time, sweet and simple, as though time were young and fearless. 

--East of Eden, John Steinbeck

I once some many years ago started out reading East of Eden, but somehow at that time I could not get into it. Or perhaps it was just the many responsibilities and demands on my time that existed back in those younger years that interrupted my progress. It is, after all, a very long novel, requiring a reader's devotion. But I have returned to it again, now bereft of excuse, and, some 150 pages in, I am quite enjoying it. 

This is a story, in the most brief summation, of a good man, a bad man, and an evil woman. And of course it is all quite biblical. The blurb on the back of my particular edition describes the book as 'A fantasia of history and myth', which seems apt enough, because the Bible itself is a fantasia of history and myth, all intermingled and vigorously stirred to a froth. So it happens that we make myth of history, and vice versa, and are never quite sure of which is which. It is all muddled in the way folks wanted it to be. What is truth, right? Lost in the soup of history and myth, of personal preference and personal experience. 

A professor of mine at university once said that one cannot understand American literature without knowing the Bible. I have always remembered that. And I cannot help but see that East of Eden is laid out in a sort of biblical form, flowing from myth to tale to history to poetry, leaving it to the reader to divine which is which, and leading him in any case, whether he divines or does not, to the same aggregate of understanding. (In other words, old literature majors like to pick and pluck at a book, but it is hardly a requirement in general 😉).