Several years ago I re-read The Catcher in the Rye, which I had originally read as a teenager. When I read it as a teenager, I thought Holden Caulfield was SO COOL!!! When I read it in my 40’s, he just seemed very sad and pathetic. I still loved the book, but I was amazed at how much of a barometer of personal change it was for ME. That wasn’t exactly “disturbing,” but it was revealing. A book, of course, does not change, but we change, and the world we live in changes. I guess if you want to know how much you’ve changed, go read an old favorite book.
Strangely, though…in college I read a lot of P.G. Wodehouse’s screwball Wooster books. Every now and then I’ll pick one off my shelf and read a few chapters, and I still always enjoy these tales just as much. This is a much different experience than the one I had with Catcher in the Rye. Why?
Maybe Salinger in the 1950’s was trying so hard to be profound, but Wodehouse in the 1920’s and 1930’s was only trying to be entertaining? Or maybe it was because Salinger was writing about someone my own age, in the somewhat modern and (somewhat) REAL world, while Wodehouse was just writing silly stuff in a silly setting that could never be real to me. The world of Wodehouse is as far removed from my real life as Middle Earth. It never was, it never could be, so why should it change?
Middle Earth? Lord of the Rings? Don’t even get me started! That’s another journal entry for another day!
