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 in never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
In John Steinbeck's "East of Eden," the decline of deities is depicted as a catastrophic event rather than a gradual fading. When gods fall, they do so dramatically, either breaking apart or descending into obscurity, making their restoration a challenging and often fruitless endeavor. This process highlights the difficulty of rebuilding what has been lost, suggesting that once a figure of reverence has fallen, it can never truly regain its former...
