This winter, I read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a dynastic epic about families, cities, time, and the eternal battle of humanity. When I wasn’t doing that, I watched clips from Minneapolis as agents of the state tormented, beat, and killed residents of an American city for the crime of simply standing up for their neighbors. Through all of this, I waited for baseball to come back.

When it comes to sports, especially in times of crisis, it’s often hard to balance your desire to watch athletics with the despair of the world around you. It was the same during the early months of the COVID pandemic, as I read stories of deaths, of healthcare workers crying, and had to silence the part of me that hoped baseball would come back. I knew it was selfish, I know it’s selfish now, but I can’t help but hope. During these times, there is a common refrain to give yourself grace. To say, "you have to have distractions you can’t be fully involved in helping resistance all the time.” And I guess it’s true that you’ll drive yourself crazy never relaxing. You have to live a normal life as much as you can. But I’m not sure I believe we need to give ourselves grace, per se. At least, not in the sense of constant validation.

East of Eden received a significant amount of criticism when it first released as many felt the central theme of Cain and Abel was overwrought and obvious. Which, it was. Three characters of the book debate Cain and Abel in one of the more central scenes of the novel and then he pointedly connects characters to Cain throughout. But I didn’t read it as obvious allegory. That characters were given A names or C names to determine if they were Cain-coded or not wasn’t bothersome to me. This was because I didn’t feel the book was trying to retell the story in modern age at all. I didn’t see each character as Cain or Abel, rather that all were a mixture of both. In the book, Steinbeck breaks the narrative at the start of each section with a chapter speaking in first person, as though he was a story teller on the porch attempting to make his point. As he begins part four, he ruminates on death. The previous part of the novel was full of death and it’s impacts on those that are left behind. Steinbeck closes this theme with what seems to be his own thoughts on the matter, addressing the reader as though we are sitting next to him.

In this chapter, Steinbeck discusses what makes man virtuous and what attracts us to vice. He closes with the belief that this is the eternal battle we all face all the time, but that virtue is our natural state. Virtue is eternal, he says, but vice must respawn. This chapter affirmed to me what I believe is the central theme of the novel. It’s not that Cain is evil and Abel is good. It’s that, if you are a believer in the bible (or if you’re like me and feel it at the least has some solid metaphorical stories), we are descendants of Cain and must live with that contradiction. Constantly, we fight internally to believe we are virtuous. East of Eden tells us, in my opinion, that these contradictions are simply how we live. We are good and we are evil. Vice is a constant threat, respawned over and over again to pull us. Many people have no virtue at all, like the antagonist of the story Cathy, but most of us (and most of the characters in the book) share both.

Perhaps its the Marxist in me, but living in the contradiction and understanding it provides me more peace than trying to find people who assure me that I shouldn’t feel bad for wanting baseball to come back. I don’t seek or agree with the people who tell me that I am allowed to like things despite suffering. Like suffering, like grief, like love, the contradictions are part of life itself. Though I believe we should create a world that lessens the contradictions and lessens the suffering, you can’t ever create a world that eliminates them. That doesn’t mean you should feel ok with it, but that you should accept your life with them.

In January, Minneapolis resident and Baseball Prospectus author Matt Trueblood wrote about the dichotomy of baseball and violence, he commented on the baseball world soldiering on despite the very real problems that existed just outside their doors This juxtaposition and contradiction is ever present in our lives, especially as Americans. Especially for me as a white, male, upper middle class American. The comfort I live in isn’t shared by all, even my neighbors, certainly not by those our government has targeted here and abroad. Reactionaries on social and traditional media will spend their entire lives telling you that it’s not important to confront this juxtaposition, that you shouldn’t feel bad for living in the contradiction, but they are lying. Not that I believe we should constantly feel bad about being alive where we are alive. We didn’t choose this, obviously, and the solutions to these problems are as big and vast as the problems themselves. You can’t install anti-imperialism into the brains of the American government by skipping a baseball game, after all.

But I think what Steinbeck was trying to say, what I am trying to say, is that you shouldn’t be content with that either. There is a space between feeling bad all the time about the injustices of the world and agreeing with the bozos on TikTok that validate you for buying shirts instead of standing up for virtue. Throughout the novel, Steinbeck presents characters that have a constant undertone of virtue but that doesn’t make them Good all the time. The Hamilton family is kind and virtuous to each other but they make decisions that sometimes betray their vices. Adam Trask and his children are no different. Being good isn’t something you constantly are and chasing that idea leads you to validators trying to sell you on the idea that you should never feel uncomfortable with the world.

I long for baseball, but it’s a selfish longing. I know that and I reflect on that often. I don’t believe I’m a good person for knowing that or for confronting it or anything. I just live with the contradiction of the vices and the virtue inside me. Baseball itself is the same. I believe it to be a virtuous thing that doesn’t mean it isn’t beset by vice. We live with the bad because we thrive in the good. The community, the friendship, the celebration, the achievement. That doesn’t disappear when things are bad and that isn’t something you should feel bad about. But it is a contradiction and one we have to live with. The bad isn’t gone just because there is good just as much as the opposite is true.

Steinbeck closes this chapter with some of my favorite lines from the novel. “When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence 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 so to live 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.”

You never defeat evil especially any evil inside you, it always respawns, but you are always driven by the desire to do good. So to must we live in the contradiction, but we must always confront it. That doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t have closure, maybe it’s a little too much of the Irish ennui that surrounds the book, but I think it’s true and I think it helps in dealing with everything.

I’ll always love baseball and all the good things it provides, I won’t deny myself the joy it brings me this season. But I live with the contradictions that joy brings. And I know that virtue is a choice, but it can’t be killed if you make the wrong one.

Anyway, play ball.