Infinite Content, Infinitely Content

One of my good friend’s mom’s, who became perhaps my friend as well, when I was younger was an anthropology professor who spoke four languages (including Korean, and once she called one of my dad’s students over the phone and when he met her he couldn’t believe that she wasn’t a Korean herself). She traveled everywhere all the time for conferences and was dedicated to all of her students and was really just this sort of beaming light of awesomeness. As a twelve year old, I remember seeing her as my role model - I was gonna be just like her. Not an anthropologist, but I assumed at that point an astrophysicist or mechanical engineer or something, but I would also spend my days working and working, but also having a family and having cool hobbies and having an quirky minimalist style (walls white, furniture bright!) and maybe an artist on the side, doing everything possible. I saw her as an Everything Woman, and I wanted to be that too. Not just a renaissance man, but really an Everything...

The first time I read The Catcher in the Rye was in seventh grade, and it was kind of my first love of a novel. Rereading it now, I still love it, but it’s obviously not the same as before. I read the book earlier as being about a bitter teenager who was angry at everything and everyone, maybe only sparing his sister because she was still a child. But what I didn’t notice before that truly struck me is how much Holden actually cares about people. Not only that, but it’s the root of his bitterness about phony people. Love and the challenging of gender norms now seem to me to be the most important parts of the novel. I think he really cares about Jane; he thinks about her like a human and in his descriptions of their time together he seems particularly empathetic. He enjoys talking to Mrs. Morrow, and the nuns, and he finds interesting things in their conversations. He wants to save face with all of the people he meets in order to make their interactions as pleasant for them as possible...