Subject: Back from the dead, or the living
Nuwanda2001@aol.com
Date: Fri Mar 17 2000 - 19:27:44 EST
Hello all, I don't know if you recall a terrible speller with a vocalized
sexual attraction to Holden Caulfield but if you don't I'll give you a hint.
My name was then clokwrkorj@aol but here I am again, Becky the 18 year old
girl who just finished a 15 page paper entitled J. D. Salinger: The Spiritual
Struggle of the Bananafish for my Sr. AP English class. I haven't been around
much, working hard at school, looking at colleges and devoting needed
attention to my love life which is finally is smooth swing. I just wanted to
say that after maybe 10-13 hours of typing this damn thesis and maybe two
times as many hours reading the opinions and theories of some of Americas
most renown literary critics, I finally understand the whole idea of
Bananafishism enough to hold it in my head all at once without getting very
confused. And after rereading Franny and Zooey (my new Bible) for a third
time I FINALLY FINALLY understand. I think it was a moment when Zooey looked
out the window and saw a woman and her dog happy from reuniting, when her
said to Franny "There are nice things in the world. Really nice things, but
we're all so worried about ego that we forget to look." Or something to that
measure, combined with a quote from Buddy that "if a man should lie bleeding
to death at the bottom of a hill and a young girl or an old woman should walk
by with a beautiful jug balanced on her head, that man should be able to rise
himself up and watch her pass until she is safely out of view." (Which I
think I may use for my Sr. quote) And finally a quote from Walt that
"religion and all its pains and troubles are something God has given to any
man who has the gall to call what he created ugly" or something like that.
God, I wish I had the book on hand but it is currently in my boyfriend's
possession. Anyway, I get it, I really get it and I've never felt so
fulfilled. There was the answer right there on the pages the whole time, the
cure for the fever right there in front of me. I suppose I was a bit like
Franny, maybe that's why I didn't like her the first time I read the book
(ignorant little me) but I have become very......dissatisfied with the people
around me. God I was surrounded by Wally Campbell's, they were crawling
through the walls and I either snapped at them or tried to be like them. And
I was just so depressed. I thought that maybe college would be different from
highschool, fewer people who's main priorities were makeup and being popular,
but I was wrong. It's just the same, a little bigger but basically the same.
So it was here I realized that they were not the problem, it was ME. I
couldn't look past the fact that they were not like me. But Now I Get It! You
see it doesn't MATTER. You just have to love them, that's all. It's not quite
as easy as it sounds but I'm getting there, slowly. I used to think the
answer was to Understand them, to look into them and try to find an answer,
to see why they lived this way. You cannot hate what you understand. But you
can never do it with everyone because we are so divided by indivisualality
and experience. You just have to love them and that's it. No matter what...
So now I get it. And I feel like I can come here and say something good,
maybe not something beautiful. I don't know if I can be a poet like this.
Maybe just droppings, but they're MY droppings, and if their smell hangs in
the air for a while around here than I've done a damn good thing.
Becky
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