Catcher in the rye

"I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall [...] It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, "It's a secrete between he and I " Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know [...]

This fall I think you're riding for--it's a special jind of fall, a horrible kind. The man fallingisn't permitte to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started. [...]"

I just finished reading the novel. Perhaps something I should have done when I first came across it in high school. Other kids were reading it, but I never did. I never understood what the fuss was all about at that age. But I do now.

I feel like Holden, he's the main character. Lost, confused, discontented, lonely and depressed. He's actually sick, but he doesn't know it... and neither does the reader till the very end. He's sick in the head, because there are constantly a thousand thoughts and images rushing through his mind. He has difficult concentrating, focusing and staying interested in any one thing. He's sad, bitter and perhaps angry too, at many people and at the state of the world. He can't name one thing he likes... but there are many things that bother him, that make him feel like puking or swearing... even though, deep down inside, he longs for the comfort and safety of childhood, of yesteryears. He's an adolescence thrust into a world of adults, but with one foot in the past. Traumas of death, abuse continue to linger in his mind... the happiness and lights and colours of growing up remain etched in his head, but he is afraid that they will fade with every passing day.

I may not be as discontented or angry as him, I do feel and can identify with many of his traits of his character. Maybe that's why it's such a celebrated novel, because it captures the mind of a confused adolescence who is desparate for love and help so well... By no means am I unique, I do not think, in being often plagued by feelings of depression and sadness and loneliness.But I am troubled, my mind is besieged by thoughts, fantasies and dreams, and all the while I long, I long so much for understanding and affection. Which Holden does not get. And neither do I, I feel.

But I don't think I am crazy, at least not yet. Then again, who knows a few years down the line, if all else remains the same, where and what state of mind I will be in...