Thou Mayest

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

“‘I don’t very much believe in blood,’ said Samuel. ‘I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.’

‘You can’t make a racehorce of a pig.’

‘No,’ said Samuel, ‘but you can make a very fast pig.’”

I. Thou Mayest

Meaning: though our stories may carry a familiar echo through generations, our engagement shapes the path our lives take. Mistakes may run through our blood, but predisposition and predestination are two very different things.

We may choose to be here or not. We may proceed or regress, we may live or get off the pot, and life has a way of forcing our hands when we become idle. Many such cases in East of Eden as we follow the arc of the Trask and Hamilton families.

East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck

An inter-generational family epic set at the turn of the 20th century

Nods to the story of Cain and Abel and approaches themes of determinism, generational trauma, and the human experience.

FFO: The book of Genesis, A Song of Ice & Fire, The Road

II. Projection & Perception

“You’re so obsessed with making it seem so much more epic, so much more important than it really is. Christ, you work in a convenience store, Dante! And badly, I might add. I work in a shitty video store, badly as well. That guy Jay’s got it right, man. He has no delusions about what he does.”

Delusions are abundant in East of Eden, particularly in the form of the men projecting romantic ideals on their love interests. Apparently it isn’t a new concept to make up a version of someone in your head that doesn’t match the truth of things.

Projection, even if flattering to its object, is its own quiet form of rejection. It rejects a person’s humanity in lieu of something hypothetical and flawless, denying their capacity to be imperfect and complex. Steinbeck suggests that the nugget at the center of every story is rejection: either fear of it or a response to its sting.

“The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt — and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is.”

Now, in Adam’s defense, his beloved killed her own parents, bit Sam Hamilton’s hand like a feral dog, then left the family behind to run a dark-sided BDSM brothel. Perhaps sometimes projection can be a quiet form of self-preservation from painful truths.

Is it better to live in the dark or to open yourself to the vulnerability of truth?