Excerpt from : The Grapes of Wrath - 01

THE HOUSES WERE LEFT vacant on the land, and the land was vacant because of this. Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive; and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, the disks of the plows shining. The tractors had lights shining, for there is no day and night for a tractor and the disks turn the earth in the darkness and they glitter in the daylight. And when a horse stops work and  goes  into  the  barn  there  is  a  life  and  a  vitality  left,  there  is  a  breathing  and  a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws clamp on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life.
But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse. Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who  has  little  understanding  and  no  relation.  For  nitrates  are  not  the  land,  nor
phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his  elements  knows  the  land  that  is  more  than  its  analysis.  But  the  machine  man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry;
and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.


[ Excerpt from Chapter 11 - The Grapes of Wrath - By John Steinbeck ]