Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

John Steinbeck

Not that it is necessary to be remembered bu there is one purpose in writing that I can see, beyond simply doing it interestingly. It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice. And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be literature I do not know. It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth, and a few remnants of fossilized jaw bones, a few teeth in strata of limestone would be the only mark our species would have left on the earth. Now this I must say and say right here and so sharply and so memorably that it will not be forgotten in the rather terrible and disheartening things which are to come in this book; so that although East of Eden is not Eden, it is not insuperably far away.

I think I know. It is fascinating how method assembles itself. The man who holds on to an impossibility is a frightening spectacle to many people and yet that is exactly what we all do more or less. It is simply a matter of degree.

He admired anyone who laid down his line and followed it undeflected to the end. I think this was because he abandoned his star in little duties and let his head go under in the swirl of family and money and responsibility. To be anything pure requires an arrogance he did not have, and a selfishness he could not bring himself to assume. He was a man intensely disappointed in himself. And I think he liked the complete ruthlessness of my design to be a writer in spite of mother and hell.

And now to the book. Today I am going into plans for the Salinas Valley. I am going to set down Adam's plans for his life. The fact that he isn't going to get even one of them has no emphasis whatever. Plans are real things and not experience. A rich life is rich in plans. IF they don't come off, they are still a little bit realized. If they do, they may be disappointing. That's why a trip described becomes better the greater the time between the trip and the telling. I believe too that if you can know a man's plans, you know more about him than you can in any other way. Plans are daydreaming and this is an absolute measure of man. Thus if I dwell heavily on plans, it is because I am trying to put down the whole man. What a strange life it is. Inspecting it for strangeness. There are strange things in people. I guess one of the things that sets up apart form other animals is our dreams and our plans. Now that is enough of that.

Steinbeck's letters to his editor, Pascal Covici, will help you write. Steinbeck whines and complains and crows and rejoices about all his struggles in writing East of Eden. He also throws in a good bit of philosophy. Hopefully these letters will open your mind just a little into the vast ocean that is beneath every book.

The spots of gold on this page are the splatterings from beautiful thoughts.

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

The orderlies were impatient to get him to his room, so I didn't talk with him long. I just said hello, that I hoped he'd feel better soon, and he smiled tiredly.

But is it really that important? Okay, it's really nice to have a good carer. But in the end, is it really so important? The donors will all donate, just the same, and then they'll complete.

Nice words are ominous. Nice words said nicely are even more ominous. I don't know how to explain this book, so I am only going to try and explain the first quote. The reason I give you this normal sounding (you might even say "nice") passage is because it carries some of the most awful evil I have ever seen. The speaker says these words to a man in a wheelchair after he has just "donated" a third organ. No gun was held to his head and the organ was chopped out of him with full consent. He is even scheduled to have a fourth organ chopped out of him as soon as he recovers enough. (If that last sentence doesn't blow your mind into little fragments, stop what you are doing, go outside and scream until the back of your throat starts to bleed and your lungs implode--if the sentence did make sense you will just now be coming back from this exercise).
But the thing that gets me, that really gets me about this quote is that little phrase: "I hoped he'd feel better soon." The speaker knows just as well as the man she is talking to that he is not going to get better; that in all reality the man is going to be murdered (it's not called murder because everyone has nice feelings about it) in a short amount of time. And she has the audacity, the evil, to wish this man good health and the hope that he will get better soon.
Put a dent in a wall; scream out loud for a while; tell the next person who suggests you get an eight to five job to fuck off and go eat some grass while your fingernails and hair grow long. Seven years ought to do the trick. Maybe you can have some hanging gardens to run wild in.
Catch you on the flip side.

Till We Have Faces

C. S. Lewis

Don't you want to hear my story?

I wanted to be a wife so that I could have been her real mother. I wanted to be a boy so that she could be in love with me. I wanted her to be my full sister instead of my half sister. I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich.

How if I am indeed to wed a god?

That there should be gods at all, there's our misery and bitter wrong. There's no room for you and us in the same world. You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive. We want to be our own.
It's only the lies of poets, lies of poets, child. Not in accordance with nature.

But how if it's not so at all? How if we were made to be dregs and refuse everywhere and everyway?

Why should your heart not dance?

And though her face was pale with the heat and her lips cracked with thirst, she was no more pitiable than when I have seen her, often pale with heat and thirsty, come back with the Fox and me from a summer day's ramble on the old hills. She was merry and in good heart. I believe, from the way her lips moved, she was singing.

Then I did a thing which I think few have done. I spoke to the gods; myself, alone, in such words as came to me, not in a temple, without a sacrifice.

Only this I know. This age of ours will one day be the distant past. And the Divine nature can change the past. Nothing is yet in its true form.

Well. You have a secret from me, he said in the end. No, don't turn away from me. Did you think I would try to press or conjure it out of you? Never that. Friends must be free. My tormenting you to find it would build a worse barrier between us than your hiding it. Some day--but you must obey the god within you, not the god within me. There, do not weep. I shall no cease to love you if you have a hundred secrets. I'm an old tree and my best branches were lopped off me the day I became a slave.

They rushed over me in their joy; perhaps they did not see me; certainly I was nothing in their minds. I understood it well. They butted and trampled me because their gladness led them on; the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is. We call it the wrath of the gods; as if the great cataract in Phars were angry with every fly it sweeps down in its green thunder.

Die before you die. There is no chance after.

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

I ended my first book with the words No answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fear you, I might---

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work.

All things come to pass in their appointed time. Words I had, flutter away like so many moths before the wind of Till We Have Faces. I seem always to read books when I most need to read those particular books. If you are a sane person you will of course claim that its me and not the books that's doing the writing. But if you join me in my foolery, you might be brave enough to believe that the books really are medicines (of the sweetest taste, I assure you) for specific ailments that could have worked in no other time nor any other place.
I was not familiar with the Cupid and Psyche myth (beyond knowing that it existed) before I read this. As always though, Lewis tickles a part of me that believes there is a truth that has always been there--even in the myths of an ancient and no doubt pagan people.
Why don't the gods answer us? Why do they harm us? In the recognition of what we truly are (for the recognition of what they truly are is not yet allowed for us) is the answer; God is the cataract. Step into the whitewater, step into the waves, into the waterfall's pounding fury, into the mounding water, the deep green, the black, deep.

Joy silenced me.

The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho

Well, usually I learn more from my sheep than from books.

In order to find the treasure, you will have to follow the omens. God has prepared a path for everyone to follow. You just have to read the omens that he left for you.

The old man pointed to a baker standing in his shop window at one corner of the plaza. When he was a child, that man wanted to travel, too. But he decided first to buy his bakery and put some money aside. When he's an old man, he's going to spend a month in Africa. He never realized that people are capable, at any time of their lives, of doing what they dream of.

It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.

At that moment, it seemed to him that time stood still, and the Soul of the World surged within him. When he looked into her dark eyes, and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke--the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. Something that exerted the same force whenever two pairs of eyes met, as had theirs here at the well. She smiled, and that was certainly an omen--the omen he had been awaiting, without even knowing he was, for all his life. The omen he had sought to find with his sheep and in his books, in the crystals and in the silence of the desert.
He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way had never learned the universal language. Because, when you know that language, it's easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it's in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one's dreams would have no meaning.

It's a future that was written so as to be altered.

Even though I complain sometimes, it said, It's because I'm the heart of a person, and people's hearts are that way. People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren't, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.

Why a revolver? he asked.
It helped me to trust in people, the Englishman answered.

No, he heard a voice on the wind say. If I had told you, you wouldn't have seen the pyramids. They're beautiful, aren't they?

I'm coming, Fatima.

Omens. Do you think it's an omen that I read this book after reading that book? Do you think one book would pose the question and another book--seemingly chosen at random and in ignorance--would provide the answer? Do you dare to believe that it is more than my mind forcing and welding connections where there weren't any before? I do.
The Alchemist reads like a child's book. It is because it's a child's life and takes place in a child's world. It makes you wonder what truth there really is, for all our blind talk, in the child-like. I am not asking idle questions, nor making flippant statements. I take these things seriously enough to walk. If you know what I mean by that, then you might be on the way yourself.
This is the story of dreams. This is the story of pursuing those dreams. You play, you win, you play, you lose, you play. But life is no gambling game. Life makes you shoot craps but it won't ever toss you a card and say that was the point.
Some apocryphal gospel quotes Jesus as saying: Life is a bridge, build no house upon it. There comes a time when we have to ask what it is we are reading and what it is that we are looking at. Are all these stories just lies? Do we believe the wily fox: Not that this ever really happened. It's only lies of poets, lies of poets, child. Not in accordance with nature." Are we finally ready to grow up? Or will we choose to deny stories and in that denial live in a fictional world? Who hasn't read Peter Pan. We get to choose whether this is Never Never Land or not. We get to decide whether we live in Never Never Land or have never been there. Which one will it be?

The Hermit

Eugene Ionesco

They took me for a scarecrow.

That's life, I heard someone behind me saying, you die.

Tortures and disturbs. There is one solitude which is both boring and unbearable, and that is the one where you compare yourself to others, call on them, have need of them, a solitude in which you flee from them because you believe in their existence. Since you're afraid of others, you rush forward as though to disarm them.

It doesn't keep us from sleeping, the wife of the retired man put it.

Or she might think it was the lack of money, the dull anonymous work routine that had nipped our life in the bud; but love can move mountains, love can burst all bonds, even steel; nothing can stand in its way, as we all know. It's our own mediocrity that makes us let go of love, makes us renounce it. True Love doesn't know the meaning of renunciation, is not even aware of that problem, never resigns itself; resignation is for beaten people, as beaten paths are for beaten men.

Was it my fault? Was it only my fault? I hadn't known how to go about it. There could have been happy times, times when the gloom was pierced by a ray of joy. Is that true? Could there have been light? Could there have been love? There could have been, there could have been. Think of all the missed opportunities! The women who had left me because I was incapable of love. My final chance had been with Yvonne. Or was it Marie? But there was love in me. In the vaults and prisons, in the dungeons of my soul. Locked up. The doors were locked and I didn't have the key. Alas, yes: all that was buried very deeply and distant.

No, she wasn't in the habit of looking up over the rooftops. She hadn't noticed a thing. In the first place, she spent her nights sleeping. During the day she was too busy. She had work to do. She would look up at the sky on Sunday.

Why is it that we always laugh too late? Nothing is really serious, since everything passes.

He hung up. I thought that it was strange for him to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be forever asking questions about the nature of the universe, about what the human condition really was, my condition, what I was doing here, if there was really something to do. It seemed to me on the contrary that it was abnormal for people not to think about it, for them to allow themselves to live, as it were, unconsciously.

The wallpaper was very well done, and very pretty: roses against a white background. I'm very fond of flowers. Unless it was the paperhanger who liked them.

Maybe that's what she was waiting for...

I have always liked Ionesco. He makes Rhinoceroses charge through city streets. He makes my heart falter and then suddenly realize that it hasn't been beating for quite some time, and as a final fulfilling blessing, he tells me that it's okay if my heart doesn't beat.
Be careful of this book. Be sure you're feet are firmly stuck the in mud. Stick them deep enough the mud will pull your shoes off if you try to get out. Better to lose your shoes than your life. No man can idly ask the question: "What is the human condition?" And yet all men are asking this idle question. We are running our mouths and have demeaned our hearts because of this. You have to ask the question if you are going to ask it. Think about this.
What is the human condition? What are we doing here? What is the point? You ask this question to get an answer, not to pass the time. I have been myself and seen a thousand other people asking this question like they ask for the time of day or about the weather. I pray that God will have mercy on us for this.
This question, when asked, will drive you out of your mind. And I am beginning to suspect that insanity is necessary for life. It is now my belief that good life is won through insanity.
Therefore, my eyes don't fall and I punch walls. First there was one and then one made two and the two made three and the three made the myriad beauties...what's the waiting for?

I choose insanity.

Take me as a scarecrow.