East of Eden has helped me see why the novel is the best form with which to explore being. Within its pages, I saw and felt, from birth to death, the trial that is human life. I feel as if I saw and felt it all. Experiencing this completeness, this totality of humanity left me in awe. I was awestruck by the author's authority. I couldn't fathom how he had come to know human experience so deeply and then distil this into a collection of stories that fools (myself included) can read and learn from.

To honour Steinbeck's effort, and in my own small way, express my gratitude towards him, I want to note some of the lessons I learned from the lives of his characters which, like me and every other human, past and present, live east of Eden.

i. We All Have a Moral Inheritance and It Contains Both Good and Evil

For Steinbeck, we are all descendants of Cain. That is to say, if we were to inspect our genealogy, we would all find some dread ancestor stinking up our bloodline with their ill-lived life and acts of evil. Our capacity for evil has been passed down through the generations if not, biblically speaking, since the fall of man, then certainly since Cain slew his brother Abel. That first act of vengeance courses through our veins (and the novel) since God, letting him live, banished Cain east of Eden to the land of Nod, where his progeny proliferated his tainted blood across the world.

Ancestrally speaking, the novel suggests we don't have to look back that far to find our evil kin -- they're usually a lot more closely related to us than we think. Indeed, before reading East of Eden, I had been wrestling with this very idea. To me, my dad was the dread ancestor. Like Cathy, he chose to forsake his children; like Cathy, he did this after profiting from his partner's benevolence; and like Cathy, he pursued money. Why? I never knew, but I had worried I was him, just like Cal feared he was his mother. The book, though, gives hope to those who find themselves lost in the dark shadows of their forebears: timshel.

Timshel is a term taken from the Hebrew Bible that translates as 'thou mayest.' It suggests that we who have inherited the evil gene have a choice. We are not destined to be evil, though we may. Likewise, we are not destined to be good, though we may. Really, we should figure out just what causes us to do evil so we can, instead, choose to do good because, well, timshel.

In East of Eden, the characters' stories helped me understand what gives rise to my own evil by seeing theirs play out before me. I saw what brings about the possibility of evil, but saw, too, what gives rise to the possibility of good.

ii. To Choose Good, We Must Recognise the Roots of our Wrongdoing

Steinbeck shows us two types of evil: (A) irrational -- unthinking acts driven by passion; and (B) rational -- premeditated acts driven by malice.

So, how does this play out in the novel?

Type A:

1. Charles Trask feeling sore after his old man spurned his gift and beating the shit out of his brother Adam.
2. Cal Trask, like his uncle (cough, father!), feeling sore after his old man (cough, uncle!) spurned his gift and -- mentally -- beating the shit out of his brother Aron.
3. Tom Hamilton, riddled with guilt and despair, blowing his brains out after the death of Dessie, his sister.

Type B:

1. Cathy Ames. Need I say more? Surely one of literature's most malignant characters! She's the monster that burned her parents to a crisp; busted a cap in her husband; poisoned her boss; and the list goes on.

Steinbeck suggests that if you're prone to dishing out Type A evil, there's hope for you. Type B however... well, if you're dishing that out, you might be a bit fucked.

You see, the trouble with having two types of evil is one of awareness. It is all too easy to misunderstand the roots of our wrongdoing. Take Cal -- who I identified with most closely in the novel -- who believes that he, because he is Cathy's son, is inherently evil. He believes that he has inherited his mother's propensity for perpetrating cold, calculated acts of Type B evil. However, this awareness of his heritage distracts him from a deeper inspection of himself. I feel if he were to have taken a good, hard look in the mirror and entered the chambers of reflection, he might have become truly self-aware, and realised that his evil plays out only after he experiences intense negative emotion. His evil is a reaction, not a calculation. Cal manifests Type A evil. Like we all do, he reacts to pain. The cause: rejection -- and all its associated feelings: abandonment, loneliness, isolation, alienation. It seems, then, it's not his mother's genes that have caused Cal's evil. It's the wound she inflicted on his soul when she left him -- a baby -- without the warmth of a mother's love.

"I would have been so happy if you could have given me--well, what your brother has--pride in the thing he's doing..."¹

Adam's rejection of Cal's gift at Thanksgiving ripped this wound open, and Cal had to do something about it. Now, he believes he knows himself. He believes his nature leads him to the cruellest weapons -- his "rifle"² -- so that he can gun for his assailants. Never able to heal his wounds, Cal does the next best thing: he wounds those who wound him. He's done this since he was a boy. It's what saw him take potshots at Abra when he noticed she had eyes for Aron, convincing her that his brother would gift her a snake and not a rabbit, as well as tricking her into thinking she had "wet [her] pants."³

Now, we all have our natural inclinations, our genetic predispositions. If these happen to be bad, it gets problematic when we start to believe that we are actually bad. In the case of Cal, his belief in his evil nature is confirmed when he finds out who his mother is, what she has done and what she is doing: "I've got her in me,"⁴ he laments to Lee. Unfortunately, this false belief leads to his submission. He submits to evil -- it's all he's good for. It's for this reason that after Thanksgiving, Cal again reached for his 'rifle' and took aim at his brother Aron to spite his father. He believed he didn't have a choice.

As I said, it's a problem of awareness. Cal is Type A evil, yet he believes he is Type B. Unless this belief of his is proven false, he will continue to act evilly when his negative emotions are stirred. Cal must become truly self-aware. He must recognise that it's his pain that begets his darkness. If he does this, his free will -- timshel, 'thou mayest' -- will come to light.