Wednesday, August 17, 2011

east of eden

Updated: August 22, 2011: Considering the passing of Jack Layton today, I have decided to update this post and put the quote from East of Eden at the top, and move my previous intro to the end of the quote. Reason being, I feel that these words by John Steinbeck apply to Jack Layton's legacy. Your body may die, but you may live forever as long as people talk about you. Please excuse the attempt at humour at the end, that was my original intro to this passage.

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A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?”

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught – in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too – in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story.A man, after he has brushed of the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well – or ill?

Herodotus, in the Persian War, tells a story of how Croesus, the richest and most favoured king of his time, asked Solon the Athenian a leading question. He would not have asked it if he had not been worried about the answer. “Who,” he asked, “is the luckiest person in the world?” He must have been eaten with doubt and hungry for reassurance. Solon told him of three lucky people in old times. And Croesus more than likely did not listen, so anxious was he about himself. And when Solon did not mention him, Croesus was forced to say “Do you not consider me lucky?”

Solon did not hesitate in his answer. “How can I tell?” he said. “You aren’t dead yet.”

And this answer must have haunted Croesus dismally as his luck disappeared, and his wealth and his kingdom. And he was being burned on a tall fire, he may have thought of it and perhaps wished he had not asked or not been answered.

And in our time, when a man dies – if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man’s property and his eminence and works and monuments – the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil? – which is another way of putting Croesus’s question. Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: “Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it?”

I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great service to the world and perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died.The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone received the news with pleasure. Several said, “Thank God that son of a bitch is dead.”

Then there was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man’s love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise and, just beneath, with gladness that he was dead.

There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died, the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, “What can we do now? How can we go on without him?”

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty, men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try to live so that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly re-spawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

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Googling images for "East of Eden" brought me to a picture of a popular Korean Drama called, unsurprisingly, "East of Eden". Apparently it is popular in Korea.

The East of Eden that I was looking for was the novel by John Steinbeck. I read it. It melted my face off. Apparently it has Biblical under/over tones.

Irrelevant

Apartment Advice from Cocoa on Vimeo.

Ok, perhaps not irrelevant, as it safe to say that the book's title perhaps also alludes to a Biblical reference. But that's not why I wanted to write about it.

The book is in 4 parts, and the beginning of the 4th part has a chapter which, considering what has happened in the book up and to that point, well, let me just say that this part melted my face off.

After a cursory check on copyright laws (5% can be copied) which may have been more of an academic regulation than a legal one, I have determined that I can, nay, shall, transcribe the portion that I so enjoyed.

If you plan on reading East of Eden, you may not want to read on. If you don't plan on reading East of Eden, then you really should adjust your plans. If you've mistakenly arrived thinking this is a post about a Korean TV drama, my apologies.

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Monday, April 18, 2011

the book from where i sit

Just finished reading Doug Glanville's The Game from where I Stand over the weekend. It fulfilled my quota of a baseball book every April, a little personal reading exercise I've participated in for the last 5 or six years.

Baseball and books seem to go hand in hand together. Perhaps because unlike some other, faster paced sports, in baseball there can be a story within every pitch.

But that's not what Glanville approaches in his book. The Game From Where I Stand is more of a very brief life story about a man who's primary occupation has been baseball for the past few years. Glanville does a good job of heaping praise; for example his admiration for Tom Glavine isn't anything groundbreaking for anyone who's been exposed to Glavine's personality from beat writers. He does an even better job of respecting the privacy of others, whether it be a female associate or a player suspected of juicing (whose name has not been revealed by the Mitchell report).

In that respect, his book fails in the shocking expose category, a category easily catered to by the TMZing of mainstream society. His stories are real, but in keeping somethings held back you get to understand that Glanville is a man of integrity who will not attract attention to himself by using others.

I'm not saying I want an expose of a book like Canseco's Juiced, far from it. Although releasing a name or two as a suspected "juicer" surely would have put Glanville's book on a more populated book tour and perhaps garnered a greater release, it would have lowered the class of the book.

This book has class. It's about baseball from the viewpoint of a professional major leaguer who's played very recently. His anecdotes are heartfelt; and if you're an Expos fan, you will enjoy his take on Montreal.

It was fun to read, a good insight into another major leaguer. To that extent I will provide a single excerpt of a passage that spoke to me;


We call it advancement, the act of getting closer to something ahead or in front of us. But when we lock in on that target as the next step, sometimes we forget what got us here. The need to demonstrated success, the show, and glitter all play into why we can end up chasing illusions that take us away from our true selves.
All players battle with this in some form, and most get lost for at least a moment or two. (If you are lucky, that's the worst of it.) But when you get disoriented, you just have to be courageous enough to turn around, regroup, and look for home. That place where you can look closer of the matchup of needs versus wants.
Even if you have to go back down those stairs for a while.

morass n: swamp