Yesterday afternoon I sat on my deck and finished John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. A marvelous, sprawling epic. For me it ranks right up there with my all time favorite novel, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Great novels like East of Eden, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, A Tale of two Cities, Moby Dick, etc., are valuable for this simple reason: What masterpieces of literature have in common is their insight into human beings. An author can reveal the inner sanctum of a person; the author can tell us what a person is thinking and let us in on their deepest secrets — something which is nearly impossible to do in real life. If the author chooses to do so they can give us a “God’s eye view” of the world they have created with their writing. And the literary giants aren’t just great writers, they are also great perceivers. Steinbeck, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, Melville and the rest have helped me to understand the human soul far more than you might imagine.

And sometimes they stumble upon the utterly profound.
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