“ ‘The nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.’ ”
–Lee, reading from Marcus Aurelius (563).
I’m not going to list all of my favorite quotes from East of Eden. I would mostly end up listing all the pages on which Samuel Hamilton speaks at length. An all-time great character among the literature I’ve read, to be sure. But I keep coming back to the above quote when thinking about inheritance and fate in this novel. I wonder how much a quote like this can compel a novelist to write. Maybe Steinbeck stumbled across this quote somewhere, and suddenly his direction for the novel became clear. The use of a predecessor in one’s work, especially a quote as spot-on as this, is a kind of inheritance all it’s own, don't you think?
What I would like to explore in this post instead of more quotes: the inversion of character/roles, self-indulgence, war, and the ending. No funny business. I’m diving in deep.
