Model—Circularity of the Written Commentary
PASSAGE:
When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always
have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—
his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing
about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a
tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again.
It is an aching kind of growing.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
CANOPY:
This evocative passage from Steinbeck’s East of Eden brings to mind a sense of panic and desolation, an anguish
unique unto itself—the desperation one feels when all that signifies protection and comfort suddenly disintegrates. The
grim despondency that defines Modern literature is contained in such a moment. Calling to mind a universal experience
that divides childhood and adolescence, Steinbeck communicates this sense of existential angst, which almost surely
must inform this novel, as it is presumably Modernist in flavor. Condensed into this shattering moment when a child
first sees adulthood as vulnerable and fallible, Steinbeck communicates the quintessential themes of the Modernist
Period: alienation and isolation.
DUPLICATE OF CANOPY:
Emotional turbulence—not simply a collision of emotion, but instead a sense of spiritual upheaval and fear—
dominates this stirring moment from Steinbeck’s novel. When man confronts his direst fear, faces his fiercest demon,
and stands completely stripped of all sense of security, what remains is an utter bleakness in the soul. This curious
place, where man can no longer feel sheltered from the abyss, is the landscape of Modernist literature. It is a place of
shadow and lurking menace. It is certainly not a playground for the idealist—but rather his graveyard.