Week-ends are for literature. The brutality of the US shock is stunning.
17M unemployed people in 3 weeks can only be compared to the Great Depression. And yet it is still difficult to figure out what it means for each of these individuals and their families. And for America.
Time to reopen The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck gave me a sense of what happened then. He puts on it words, images and a vision. And they stay. More vivid than any statistics. “I've done my damnedest to rip a reader's nerves to rags."
“For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we".
“[A]nd in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
“Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, and emerges ahead of his accomplishments”.
“This you may say of man - when theories and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.”
