A small warning first folks!
Do you know? Your skin is the largest stuff in your body, if you spread it flat, it can cover two meters on your most expensive marble floor. No matter even if it is Lux TOUCH!
And what do you think about the TOUCH? A ten or twenty seconds gentle stroking or even a small rub anywhere on this two-meter wide hull of your living ship can trigger Oxytocin (a social bonding hormone). But too much secretion of it may scupper the ship. So be careful!

Now the book ….What a crazy book!
A build-out for me ….. And a heart-rending too! I remember the mention of the Salinas River in the East of Eden. When I opened this book, its mention appeared at once again on the very first line,

“A few miles south of the Soledad, The Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank……”

OF MICE AND MEN

This river seems to be of high substance in the life of the author. Rivers infuse into you a sense of spread and proliferation, and in my case dread too. When I saw a river the first time from very near, I was weeping, my parents said. I don’t remember, I would have been as small as a 15 kg cement bag, clung to the shoulder of my mum then perhaps! I might have become skeptical about the dubious intention of its approaching billow towards me, but when I grew up and saw the sea first time, I felt the opposite; I wanted to hug it as a whole. I felt no fear. The dread was gone.

Gentlemen! Note that by the time I first saw the blue vast sea in front of my eyes, I had neither read the “Old man and the sea” nor the John Steinbeck mention of any Salinas river. But now I perceive that sea and rivers are great natural infusing agents that prompt a sense of penmanship even in a common mortal. Forget about the geniuses like Steinbeck or Hemingway!

As I imagined, two lads, George and Lennie, appearing from the brush, through the undergrowth on the first few pages, talking blamelessly in a very engaging manner in their typical dialect, on the bank of a river, lighting their fire pile from dry leaves, warming their cans of beans in the flame cracking up from those twigs, I at once felt the river has yet again achieved its purpose, a tale is born!

John Steinbeck, whose miraculous narration I had come across with, the first time in his multi-generational saga East of Eden. That time I was pressed to the core…Utterly impressed. Here in this book, he took me this time from the bank of the river to the nomad sort of lives, settling and unsettling into the vast ranches near California, those barley barns, where I found these young fellas, on their respective bunks in a bunkhouse. Someone lay still in the bed, the others playing solitaire flouncing the cards, another pushing his gun under the bunk after cleaning it, and a lazy one sleeping facing the wall drawing up his knees to his chest.

“Guys like us that work on ranches are the loneliest guys in the world they got no family they don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch and work up stake and they go into town and blow their stake”

Their way of talking was naïve, that dialect. Those unprocessed sentences come out of their mouth. Just awesome!

“He ain’t bright, hell of a good worker, though, hell of a nice fella, but he ain’t bright”

And their boss or manager talking to new recruited boys, hoping to make a sound team of workers,

“I gotta pair of punks on my team that don’t know a barley bag from a blue ball. You guys ever bucked any barley?”

And those funny conversations, the swamper talking about the previous occupant of the bed,

“Last guy that had this bed was a blacksmith- hell of a nice fella and clean a guy as you want to meet…Used to wash his hands even after he ate.”

Those who have read this book, don’t you think guys the book is about TOUCH, The psychology of TOUCH. Those TOUCH of the mouse inside the pocket of that strong-fat-innocent fellow, Lennie, who keeps tapping its fleecy dead body in the beginning. And George throwing it away, infuriated towards his mate, saying dead mouse is of no use!

“George:-” What you want of dead mouse anyways?”
Lennie:- “ I could patted with my thumb while we walked.”

This fellow Lennie wants to TOUCH whatever is soft and whatever he likes. That’s a leaning of his feeble mind. And don’t forget those repeating conversations about alfalfa, about rabbits, about puppies throughout the story. Aren’t they all fleecy fluffy kinds of stuff? Don’t you think whatever turn the story took in the last, was just because of TOUCH?

And who think the title of this book is misplaced, they did not get it right. Perhaps!
Did you not see the “OF” just before Mice and Men. Put “TOUCH” even before “OF” in the title and you may know what the book is about. Run-of-the-mill advice from me! Were both the protagonists of this book, the sick fellows? Or the only fellow who was sick was Lennie? Or was the real sick George?
Was this book about mental sickness or about nomadic life?

No. I think this book was about TOUCH and about MICE… And of course about MEN too! And while I finished this book, with much unexpected and heartbreaking end, which left me pondering over the situation for quite a long, I felt too much pity for the poor guy, who had too much faith in his mate.

I felt after the completion of this novella as if I was coming out of a dense wood after getting lost for some time. And then flashed in my mind, some lines of W.B. Yeats, I read recently. This book moved me to some other dimension, I am telling you guys!

“The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is there antique joy
Of old the world on dreaming fed
Grey truth is now her painted toy
Yet still she turns her restless head
But O, sick children of the world
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled”

W.B. yeats

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