Plowing the Fields of a Story

So, yup, I've been plowing through this story. The more I read of Cathy/Kate, the more I got the sense that I have read this before, but the only parts I remember are her, and not until I've read it. I can't recall any of the other parts of the story, the parts that are really capturing my attention this time around. I have no idea when I read this before, but I must have. I can't remember how it ends, or what is about to happen. Its got me befuddled to be honest, so I have been plowing through it, trying to piece it together, however, I think it might be time to reflect.

I'm going to try and not jump too much. I've looked up and am now on chapter 33 and I last wrote somewhere around chapter 12.

We enter a new century (1900) much as we entered 2000? "For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost-good manners, ease and beauty?" It seems that as time goes on, we continue to feel that we deepen our loss of goodness. His reflection of mass production that starts at the turn of that century, struck a chord in me... a minor cord that touches deeply. "There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good... When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking." I could quote all of chapter 13 and maybe this chapter, these 2 pages, are central to what Steinbeck may be trying to get at with this book. The mixture of our species being on a suicidal course, and value of "the free, exploring mind of the individual... This is what I am and what I am about."

This seems to be part of the mess we, or at least I, find ourselves trying to untangle ourselves from globally.  As a mass producing, mass consuming world, what have we lost? Many are searching for those lost parts. Others are still fighting to hold to them. They know the value and fight to maintain their ways of life.

As the story progresses, we find those that use their talents to acquire wealth with a variety of means. Others that have happy, simple lives going against the grain, finding joy in others' company (I think of Samuel and Lee's friendship), and then Adam in his misery letting his gifts go fallow.

As for Cathy/Kate, to me she is the greedy corporate/capitalistic world that we have inherited. Her evil is the inherent nature of that world. She can find the weakness in anyone, the things that all people will sacrifice their lives for, and uses it to get what she wants. But what is it that she wants? It is more than money? Power? Revenge? Things to fill some void that she knows not?

Its hard to not read this story and think about how this time period he writes about and how it deeply shaped the land that I now live in.