East of Eden XXIII -- chpt22: BAPTISM, minus the water

Reading Questions
Chapter 22.1

1. I can't help but think of couples who lose a child, which loss destroys their relationship, overcoming the love they have for each other, such that they can't find it--if it even continues to exist (is such a thing terminable? I think so).  Is Adam experiencing something like this or, as its his spouse and his children remain, is it entirely different?
2. What does it mean that "Adam might be pleasuring himself with sadness"?
3. It is interesting, the magic Samuel works on those around him: Lee is the prime example.  Notice how Lee's walls and masks simply slack from him when no one else is around.  It is the same, to a degree, with his children.  People are more themselves around Samuel (of course, this seems only to be the case for those who have something to hide behind: Liza is entirely bald and naked with or without him).  Does this eventually--as it hasn't until this point--work on Adam?  Is the "shocking" he's setting out to perform a bit of his wife creeping into his person?

Chapter 22.2

1. Does Liza think it's important that the boys have names at this point?  It would seem to me that perhaps she doesn't, at least inasmuch as it isn't her or anybody else's business.  If this is the case however, why does she say, quite clearly, "If you do not get those boys names, there'll be no warm place in this house for you.  Don't you dare come whining back, saying he wouldn't do it or he wouldn't listen.  If you do I'll have to go myself"?  (And she smiles when she aggravates him to shouting!  WHY!?)
2. What a beautifully self-contradictory woman!  Does she bring out--or provoke--the best in Samuel as a spouse should?

Chapter 22.3

1. Ah!  The words of a hero (I think I will have this written on my grave): "A man, his whole life, matches himself against pay.  And how, if it's my whole life's work to find my worth, can you, sad man, write me down instant in a ledger?"  (Oh, it makes my heart sing!)
2. Liza says it herself, that her husband's words are honey--poetry, true--Steinbeck's own, like some of the richest descriptive passages from Tortilla Flat (my pet favorite of the man's): "In a bitter night, a mustard night that was last night, a good thought came and the dark was sweetened when the day sat down.  And this thought went from evening star to the late dipper on the edge of the first light--that our betters spoke of.  So I invite myself."
3. And Samuel's righteous indignation like the mighty wrath of a prophet for his God!  "Tear away with your jelly fingers.  You have not bought these boys, nor stolen them, nor passed any bit for them.  You have them by some strange and lovely dispensation....  The stone orchard celebrates too little, not too much."
4. And Adam's defense (is it valid--really, is it!?): "What I do [or don't do] is my own business" speaking of his not having "laid a number" to his sons.
5. And imagine the force of the stubborn old farmer's fist on the heathen's jaw!  I met a farmer in Italy once.  I've always thought of this particular gentle giant when I've read this passage from the book.  The man towered over me, pushing seven feet, with bones too big for his skin.  I don't have small hands, but when he took mine in his for a handshake, my little paw DISAPPEARED TO ABOVE MY WRIST.  I picture a fist like this--literal or figurative with its godly power--crashing into Adam's listless face.
6. How are the boys naked without names?  They're still only babies.  With what exactly--more than one thing--will they be clothed once the names, with Adam's help and approval, are chosen and assigned?
7. Proof of Samuel's success?  "It's hard to imagine I'd thank a man for insults and for me out like a rug.  But I'm grateful.  It's a hurty thanks, but it's thanks."
8. Why do we need to sort out emotion--to label them as loss or hate or loneliness or whatever?  How will alleviating this confusion of labels help Adam ascend from his dearth?
9. A point regarding NATURE vs NURTURE: "And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them.  They will be what you expect them to be.  ...  I don't very much believe in blood.  I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb." //  From Adam: "You can't make a race horse of a pig." //  From Samuel: "No, but you can make a very fast pig."  Interesting, as this makes sense coming from Samuel, who's raised to adulthood a huge family, but not so much coming from Steinbeck, who, at the time, has only two young boys, and he's not even the one really raising them!  What do you think?  (Ad astra per alia porci.)
10. I repeat a question from before: Whose children are these boys?
11. "I'd think there are degree of greatness," Adam said.  //  "I don't think so," said Samuel.  "That would be like saying there is a little bigness."
12. Twice in this section, Samuel refers indirectly to Jesus Christ.  Once, regarding himself to be inherently too mediocre and cowardly to face crucifixion, and second, in Lee's position as a servant and a likely greater man than he or Adam will ever be.

Chapter 22.4

1. Wise Lee, regarding the negative connotation of the name, Cain, and that it's perhaps never been borne since: "Maybe that's why the name has never changed its emphasis."
2. How patient Steinbeck is as an author.  There's no rushing into the naming.  He's got something important in common with his Cathy Ames.  The moment comes as and when it will, and in the meantime he waits and takes advantage of the available moments for his further advantage.
3. "No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us."  What stories do you know and/or have read that, by this standard, are true?
4. Adam displays a personal moment of hope--of self-hope: "Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin.  Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it.  But sin is our own designing."  Yet is is also tinged with hopelessness, and with it, MASSIVE foreshadowing for both event and theme: "Because we are descended from this.  This is our father.  Some of our guilt is absorbed in our ancestry.  What chance did we have?  We are the children of our father.  It means we aren't the first.  It's an excuse, and there aren't enough excused in the world."
5. Does Adam have any inclination--even akin to deja vous--that as he defends Cain he defends his brother?
6. Samuel: "I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody' story."  (This, by the way, is the essence of the definition of Myth--not myth=fiction, but myth=foundational literature and history, true or not.)
7. "But [Aaron] didn't make it to the Promised Land."
8. Why does Samuel tear up in the final paragraph?

East of Eden VI: The Aches of the Restless and Young

Okay, so this isn't a direct parallel for Adam and Cyrus in chapter 4, but I couldn't help but think of it as I read:

For those of you just getting into this, Charles has just beat the crap out of Adam, and for questionably/debatable motive (my favorite kind), he's run off after chucking the hatchet (intended for butchering the pounding, though alive, remains of his half-brother) that proved useless after a brief, half-hearted search, and their Dad, Cyrus, has stumped off into the night, shotgun in tow, to do?  He's not sure.  He's just mad.  He loves Adam better, after all, which, we'll learn, is terribly unfair.  Now Adam is pulsing weakly in bed, and representatives of the United States Cavalry arrive, at Papa's request, to enlist the boy. 

Jerk.

***

Reading Questions 5

Chapter 4.1

1. The first major point of interest, which sets the parallel-story tone for the rest of the chapter, is that of Charles's hiding.  He brutalizes his brother, seeks to hack him up with a hatchet, and then takes off, not out of fear, but self-preservation.  He knows--though he can't articulate it's WHY, and won't be able to for some thirteen or fourteen years--that his father will not easily forgive him, and the punishment, if he doesn't stay away until things chill out, will be dire.  Remember Cain's eventual flight?  Remember Adam and Eve's hiding?  (Be it known that from here, the different points of the Bible's version get pretty muddled up, details and parallels being cast from character to character and family to family over generations.) 
2. "The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or a breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil."
3. Cyrus brings in representatives from the cavalry to enlist Adam, not because he's got the boy secure here under the weight of his injuries, but because it's time.  Why?

Chapter 4.2

1. Violence is in everyone, as was said earlier, but Adam is growing not in violence, but in passivity, and why?  BECAUSE of all the violence around him.  Is he hitting bottom the way Cyrus believes he must?  After all, "Men like Adam ... have to do a little soldering."  There's a ring of duty to this.  Despite his passivity, he will have to a maintain a level of soldiering, no matter how much he hates it.  What good, if any, is all this doing him?  Note also that while Adam is being forced to soldier, Charles is forced to till the ground--agriculture, the ultimate labor of the pacifist (unless you're reading Grapes of Wrath).
2. Why does Charles write so much to Adam?  The poor man's confused! --both utterly hating and completely loving his brother simultaneously.  Is such complicated emotion even possible?
3. "Tonight I cleaned the house, and it is wet and soapy and maybe not any cleaner.  How do you suppose Mother kept it the way she did?  It does not look the same.  Something settles down on it.  I don't know what, but it will not scrub off.  But I have spread the dirt around more evenly anyways.  Ha!  Ha!"
4. The shift in tone in the hesitant letter at the end of the chapter comes with the shift of writing implement.  There is symbolism here, considering the topics before and after the shift.  What?
5. "I ought to be wandering around the world instead of sitting here on a good farm looking for a wife.  There is something wrong, like it didn't get finished, like it happened too soon and left something out.  It's me should be where you are and you here."  (!)  Cain kills Abel; Charles almost kills Adam.  Charles recognizes/feels that he should be wandering; Adam's all over the country.  Genesis, chpt.4, v.12: "...a fugitive and a vagabond shalt though be in the earth." and v.16: "And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden."  If you haven't read this chapter from the Old Testament.  Read it.  Genesis, chapter 4.