08 Oct And Still the Box Is Not Full
John Steinbeck considered East of Eden the book he had been preparing to write his whole life. Published in 1952, it was enormous in scope: a story about two families, but also about good and evil, love and rejection, freedom and responsibility, and what it means to be human. He believed he had put everything he knew into it.
When he finished the manuscript, he wrote a note to his longtime editor and close friend, Pascal “Pat” Covici.
“Dear Pat,” it began.
Steinbeck reminded him of a day when Pat had found him carving a little wooden figure and asked why he never made something for him. Steinbeck asked what he wanted.
“A box,” Pat told him.
What for?
“To put things in.”
What things?
“Whatever you have,” Pat said.
“Well, here’s your box,” Steinbeck tells him.
And he had filled it. Steinbeck writes that a writer gathers what he has accumulated over a lifetime and puts it into the work: his skill, his knowledge, his thinking, his feeling, the good in him and the bad.
After giving Pat the book that held everything he knew how to give, Steinbeck ended with five words:
“And still the box is not full.”
I have loved that sentence for years. There is relief in the idea that something can hold everything we know to give it and still have room.
We do the best we can with all that we have at the time, bringing what we know, what experience has taught us, what we understand from where we stand today. We bring it to our work, to the people we lead, to our decisions and relationships, to raising our children.
Life adds to what we have to give. We learn something we wish we had known sooner. We see a choice differently from the other side of it. We acquire patience, humility, courage, tenderness. We become capable of offering something that wasn’t available to us yet.
When he was done, the manuscript lay inside the box Steinbeck had spent months making for Pat, lined in green felt. The letter rested with it.
It was complete, even with room left inside.
It’s a way to think about life, too. We can give fully from who we are now without asking that version of ourselves to know everything we will ever know. There will always be more that life gives us to bring.
And still the box is not full.