‘The future is called “perhaps” which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.’ (Tennessee Williams)
Of Mice and Men is set in America during the economically depressed 1930s. It was a time of uncertainty about finance and investments, of instability in the employment market and of considerable hardship for many ordinary people (sound familiar yet?). The itinerant farm workers that Steinbeck writes about were forced to leave their homes and move from job to job and place to place in search of their ‘fifty bucks at the end of the month’.
As the Crescent prepares to mount a production of Of Mice and Men at a time of ever-deepening gloom about the economy, I’m wondering whether we are any more or less scared of our modern-day “perhapses” and whether we are any better equipped than Steinbeck’s characters to cope with them.
Many of the characters in the play have dreams for their futures; from movie stardom to just having a small farm of their own where nobody is able to ‘can’ them; in other words control of their own destiny. What would our attitude be to their dreams today? At work it seems that I am being asked to set targets/goals for myself or others on an almost daily basis. Our target-driven society would have been a mystery to Steinbeck’s characters – ‘What’s his average grain-bags-per-hour bucking rate?’ doesn’t quite ring true!
A modern-day ‘life coach’ might advise the characters to visualise themselves succeeding and achieving their dreams. Or perhaps they ought to set themselves a series of SMART targets to help them gradually move towards the future that they want? Spending time imagining or ‘visualising’ their dreams doesn’t seem to do the characters in OMAM much good. Indeed it only increases the pathos when their dreams are shattered one by one with varying degrees of brutality. The most content characters in the story (Slim, Whit, Carlson) are arguably those don’t aspire for more than what they’ve got.
Perhaps it is not the future itself that is scary but the act of daring to have a concrete dream for it. Wanting something (however simple) so badly can make you vulnerable to the pain of disappointment, as John Steinbeck’s choice of title suggests. The line is from Robert Burns’ poem To A Mouse, On Turning Up Her Nest With A Plough;
“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men
Gang aft agley, (Often go awry)
An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!”
So is it best to settle for your lot in life and take the future as it finds you, rather than try to shape it? Not a terribly motivating message to take from a story that I love dearly. I read an interview with Sigourney Weaver recently where she said “You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘vulnerable’ until you have children.” Perhaps our dreams for our futures, like those of George, Lennie et al, are a little like children. We nurture our dreams and worry about them not working out. But ultimately, fear of losing them (dreams or children!) doesn’t usually stop us having them in the first place. We share the biological urge to reproduce with mice but perhaps it is the desire to dream that makes us men.
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