Easily Influenced

I just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. It was great. I really am glad I'm able to finally enjoy reading. I hated being forced to read in high school. We never had to read anything very unusual or interesting, just things like Romeo and Juliet, The Scarlett Letter and The Old Man and the Sea. I do like Shakespeare and Hawthorne's ok, but nothing I had to read really sparked my interest (at least not enough for me to actually read the book and not use cliffs notes.) I wish I had read The Catcher...when I was about to go into college. It's a great coming of age book. (There's a lot of bad language in it and some immature phrasing because the protagonist is supposed to be 17 when he narrates the book, but that's to be expected and I just try to skip over the profanity.)

But I said all this to say that reading the book really made my mind start churning. In fact I wish I would've written this last night right after I read the book. My mind was racing so much that I don't even remember half of the things I thought about. Reading a great book or listening to talented musicians or studying great art just really influences me. I feel like I need to "do" something afterwards. Something to make myself or make the world better. Give something back. Some of the parts of the book really inspired me, like when Mr. Antolini gives Holden this quote, " 'The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.' " Or when Holden says that he wants to go live on a ranch and marry this girl he was with right then, while they were young, because after college you become an adult and without even knowing it you accept all of these responsibilities and you will never be able to live your life as freely as when you were a child. I was just thinking, yes! That's totally the way I feel, and especially what I needed to hear when I was in high school. I wanted life to be more, but yet stay innocent and simple. (But I digress...apparently my mind's starting to race again...)

I think I'm very easily influenced sometimes. I was even so influenced while I was reading that my inner monologue began to sound a little bit like Holden's. It's kind of scary. What's more scary is that I think everyone is that way. I can't stand it when I start changing myself to sound like one person or another. Whether it's when I'm singing a song and I try to sound like the artist, or I'm writing and I try to fit into another writer's style or form, or when I'm around a certain group of people, I try to form myself to their pleasing. I don't do it so much anymore, and I feel like some of that is just natural because you always grow as a person and develop your interests and you try to fit into your own mold by trying others' on for size. But I just don't want to be blindly lead into being someone else's "picture" of me. I don't want to fit into someone else's box. And in feeling that way about myself, I get really displeased when I see the nation trying to do that. Most people just do whatever the popular census is telling them to do. We're slowly turning into a type of government that we started wars to break away from. We're being bombarded by messages of political correctness and we are subconsciously being PUSHED into "the people that we should be." It's apparently a horrible idea to look back to our past and gain some wisdom and morals from our forefathers. We barely even stand for anything on which this nation was founded. I'm not saying that progress is not necessary and that this nation hasn't made some good changes since the founding of this country. But I am saying that we have no backbone. We have no real standards to fall back on or to base our decisions. We don't respect our leadership and we are being led by any Joe Blow that has some good-smelling hot air to spread. It's depressing. In a sense, we have fallen off the cliff of rye.

I still want to be a catcher.