dear mr. steinbeck,
it is with much humility and much objectless gazing that i sit down to right this epistle of sorts. i have been a respecter of your writings for many years now, ever since i first opened the cover of
the grapes of wrath, and having now finished my sojourn though your
east of eden i must try to sift my thoughts, feeling the grit of their sand between my fingers. you have struck some thick chords within me, and i will try to capture only a few of their harmonies for the moment, for i think i will have to wait some time for the vibrations to reach the deeper and more recessed areas, and by that point i may have amended these reflections several times over.
with a certain measure of prophecy you write that the story is true that we can feel in ourselves and that we can feel is true of us; only then does it have power. only then may we call it truth. now you imbed this claim within the epic reliving of the cain-abel story, for your novel's characters find in the spare details of this story the raw stuff of timeless appeal, a kind of fulcrum for the ceaseless pendulum of the human event. i think that 'appeal' is the right word for it, too, because like job's elemental consternation we want in full what we cannot have. (we have a difficult enough time with even the few fragments we receive.) certain parts of the telling never quite add up and we find ourselves continually coming back to dig a little bit more, to survey the crime scene one more time, seeking out the kernels of truth that will--against all hope--make sense this time.
i lately find myself repeating the words of pilate, what is truth? i know what i think it to mean--or at least am told what it means, but i wonder about such simple answers. like adam trask, i suppose that i, too, fear those kinds of simple things, for Truth is too elusive a quarry, too jealously guarded a wage to be lightly nailed down and dissected. i suppose it's a bit like cupping water in our hands: no matter how tightly we clench our muscles and bunch the folds of our palms, the water always manages to seep through, leaving us only with wet hands and trace amounts of something once satisfying. we never really
find truth, we just hold onto it for a moment before it escapes and entices us to begin again the chase. but the pursuit is by no means futile; it merely changes the nature of its content. as we progress, so does it. and it leaves us little markers along the way so that we may identify the path and not lose hope, if only to stop and to rest and to take it in for a moment.
this is not to say that truth is different for every person, for if this were the case Truth would merely be an exercise in self-fulfillment and, at worst, become the self-love of idolatry. if i read you correctly, sir, Truth draws us outward from ourselves and into something infintely greater than ourselves. this seems to make sense, for what good would a story be if it captured nothing of common human wisdom and experience? for instance, we can imagine ourselves in salinas, california, because we have some reference of what the west is like. we can empathize with the members of the trask and hamilton families because we know what it is like to have fathers and mothers and siblings and children. and like cain and abel, we can understand the magnitude a single choice because we know firsthand the processes of rejection, revenge, and guilt that may accompany that choice. these are familiar stories to us, and on a grander scale the story of the israelites is our story because we can take part in its agonies and its joys, its victories and its defeats between every inhale and exhale of our lungs. it is the human story. it is about one person and includes all persons. and the pursuit of Truth is about taking hold of our place in that story and making a claim upon it--finding our little footnote in the human story and stamping our will upon it. it taps into the currents of human existence and acknowledges that something powerful is at stake in the unfolding of events in a life. we may assume that some sort of supernatural scaffolding lies just under the surface, but we have to earn a peek at it by feeling our way and understanding that everything comes down to one single choice, which will be succeeded by another single choice, and another until we have forged a destiny for ourselves that either respects or ignores that shared accumulation of wisdom.
herein lies the importance of the naming scene for adam trask's sons. a name is an intervention into life that invokes a person's destiny with a fixed point of origin. it is not a prescriptive act, but is one that demands possession, and with this sense of personal ownership comes the casting of identity. everyone needs a peg on which to hang their hat, but
we may decide what kind of hat to hang. it is not the name that consigns us to a fate, but it is up to us to determine how that name will be employed and how people will remember its taste long after we have passed on. it may inspire nobility but it does not require it, just as it may carry the hint of evil but does not supply it the means. after all, cain is perhaps the most notorious name in human history (and worn by only one individual), but the reason for this is perhaps because no one has had the courage to reforge it, to invest it with a new identity. the name does not create, we create the name. what we do with that name is what drives the great machine. how we live, the decisions that we make, and the legacy that we leave behind earn us the right to become great, and it earns us the right to be damned.
and so i come back to the question, sir, what is truth? i can't with any certainty say that it is something hard and fast, at least not in conventional terms. we can affirm all day long and into the night that jesus is the christ, but that only declares the name, uttering 'christness' into existence. and this of course leads us to the next question, what is christness? (this, too, is only a word, which will only lead to another question, and another). but the christ story only rings true because it
feels true; it taps into our story, the one filled wth gaps and rough spots. deep within ourselves we feel, we
know, that it is true, and so we seek it out, attempting to dress with our own flesh the essence of the basic human story that has been redeemed and rewritten by jesus. and we govern the telling of that story with heightened sincerity, for we possess the power to create and destroy, to build up and to tear down; we possess the power to choose. and this, i believe, is how the winding path of Truth reveals itself to us, one choice at a time, giving us the option to rule over sin or to be ruled by it. it is our choice. it is what makes us human and carves out our identity as individuals from the sediment of apathy. and it won't be the final solution for Truth, of course, but it least it's something.
timshel, mr. steinbeck. timshel.
graham kervin