“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”

East of Eden, written by John Steinbeck, is about the lives of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, whose generations repeatedly reenact the biblical story of the fall of Adam and Eve, and the deathly rivalry between Cain and Abel. Steinbeck was known to have called this novel his “magnus opus” – or his greatest achievement in all his writing. In reference to East of Eden, Steinbeck stated the following: “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.” Although the novel is only 600 pages long (which is by no means short, but also nowhere near as bad as Tolstoy’s 1300 page War and Peace), it took me half a year to finish reading. This was mostly because, at first, I hated it.

I guess I didn’t hate it, but I struggled to get past even the first chapter. The first fifteen to twenty pages of the book are spent describing grass and hills and water in the Salinas Valley of California (where Steinbeck grew up). As someone who had no idea what the plot was about before I picked up the book, I had absolutely no patience to read numerous descriptions of the change of seasons and how it affects the level of water of some stupid river in California. I put the book down, not sure if I’d ever pick it up again.

Fortunately, I did pick it up again some months later. I figured that there had to be SOME sort of plot after Steinbeck finished describing the fertility of the soil in the Salinas Valley of California. And I was right. The story never moves too fast, however. Steinbeck took his time with the story, and I think that was what made it so impactful. In my opinion, one of the greatest triumphs of East of Eden is how humanizing it is. None of their characters are placed on pedestals of morality. They actually all did pretty terrible things at different parts of the novel, which more often than not, leads to their downfall. But through all the pain and misery in the book, all the death and revenge and evil, there were still glimmers of hope in the characters. There were moments when they knew they could be more than what they believed they were destined to be.

One of the main themes of the story revolved around the quote that began this blog post – “Timshel”, or Thou Mayest. The whole point of this novel is that the children are doomed to repeat the sins of the ancestors, over and over again. The quote’s role in this story is that it defines that we have no predestination; no determined future. Instead, we have a choice. We have a choice of who we want to be and what we want to become. Our fate is not written in the stars. We write it ourselves, with our choices, with our words, with our actions.

I read a quote somewhere that said we should never try to make ourselves out to be any more than someone who is trying to do the right thing. Because when we put ourselves on pedestals of morality and goodness, we take away the aspects that make us dynamic humans. Without our blemishes and scars, Steinbeck could never have written a book like the one he’d made. And I did love the characters. Possibly all of them. Because in their ignorance, and mistakes, and jealousy, and vengeance, they tried their damned hardest to be good. And that’s what we all want. To be good. We’re all just trying. And that’s okay.

I once dismissed East of Eden as a novel too detailed, too long, and too dull to be worth reading. It was long, and slow at many parts, but the message it shared needed that time. No one could’ve cultivated so strong and impactful a phrase as “Thou mayest” as Steinbeck did. I am glad I read it through. I now consider it to be one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read.