Bleak Lighthouses

Is New York a Concrete Jungle where Dreams are Made of?

As soon as I started reading The Catcher in the Rye, I had the impression that I was going to enjoy it in some way. It was hard to read, though. Not for the complexity of words, but in fact for the slangs, idioms and expressions that you don’t hear anymore. That’s when I checked on Youtube if there was any audiobook that would help me reading it in the way the author might intended to be read, and there was. Since I started both reading it and listening to it at the same time, it was more real, it was almost if I was next to Holden Caulfield during the whole text. It was fun, I really enjoyed his sarcasm when referring to daily-life stuff.

At times it was hard for me to put myself in his shoes, especially when there were so many contradictions between what he truly believed and how he acted. However, I do share his beliefs and I can certainly relate to his feelings. I also felt at some point of my life that I was different to everybody else, and those feelings triggered me to believe that there was no point in living. Fortunately, after some hard moments in my life I found the place I belonged to, but that’s another story that I might, might not share in this post.

What I really want to refer to in this blog post is the fact that reading this book reinforced my belief that there is no American Dream, but it’s not just the AMERICAN dream, there’s also no Chilean dream, Viñamarinos Dream or Quillotanos Dream, and I say this because we know that there is a “little” influence coming from the States.

If we talk about the American Dream, we need to understand first the different points of view about it, and to do so, I would like to quote from James Truslow Adams, who was an American writer and Historian born in Brooklyn, New York. He coined the term “American Dream” in his 1931 book The Epic of America stating the following:

The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. (…) It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

This is a very positive and inclusive view of the American Dream. Yet, it has always been interpreted in the wrong way by society, as we can read in The Catcher in the Rye when Caulfield meets with Sally Hayes, a girl he used to go around with in New York, and starts letting out his feelings about his discomfort with how the rest of the people see their lives.

Take most people, they're crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they're always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that's even newer. I don't even like old cars. I mean they don't even interest me. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake. (…) I said no, there wouldn't be marvelous places to go to after I went to college and all. Open your ears. It'd be entirely different. We'd have to go downstairs in elevators with suitcases and stuff. We'd have to phone up everybody and tell 'em good-by and send 'em postcards from hotels and all. And I'd be working in some office, making a lot of dough, and riding to work in cabs and Madison Avenue buses, and reading newspapers, and playing bridge all the time, and going to the movies and seeing a lot of stupid shorts and coming attractions and newsreels. Newsreels. Christ almighty.

Holden Caulfield is not the only one who sees what the American Dream is doing in society, there are some people who share these ideas, and expand on them referring to people who follow their American Dream. In 1980, Studs Terkel, an American author, historian, actor and broadcaster, published a bestselling collection of interviews with about one hundred Americans from all realms of life that shared their definitions of the “Dream”. Here is one definition that personally I think it would fit in some way Caulfield personality.

The American Dream always has a greater force when you don’t already have it. People who grew up without it are told if you can only work long enough and hard enough, you can get that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. When you already have the pot of gold, the dream loses its force. You can’t aspire after anything material if, in fact, you’re trying to get rid of the material things, (…) you need some alternative way of giving meaning to your life.

Holden Caulfield knows deep down that this American Dream isn’t possible, searching for that false sense of perfection, trying to find a place in a crooked society surrounded by phonies, and growing up to become part of that phony world. He can’t stand it, which is why he doesn’t find his purpose in life and he feels so depressive most of the time. That is also why the only thing he sees himself doing in the future, if there is one, is preventing and saving society from falling into the phony world standards.

To some people, the American Dream as it used to be conceived doesn’t exist anymore. That is the case of my American best friend who I interviewed to know what he thought about the American Dream, and all he said, confirms even more that it is based on the standards that society wants for/from you. He is son of a Colombian mother and Peruvian father who went to the States searching for a better life (in terms of security, comfort, and finances). He told me he is a product of the American Dream that his parents followed. However, he escaped from his country because he thought it was so comfortable that he it was hard for him to fellow himself and to be independent, as in doing things from zero. He is an example that even when you reach that “Dream” you realize it doesn’t fill your life.

Saying this, I would like to connect this significant ideology to an R&B Pop song by Alicia Keys, called The Empire States of Mind. It is important to mention that New York City is the place where a lot of immigrants first arrived (from the 1700’s to the mid 1900’s) to United States, specifically to Ellis Island. In this song the artist expresses that the American Dream is still alive in the city, and that it is never easy to live it. However those “Dreams” are not everybody’s dreams as it is expressed in the novel. Caulfield does not relate to what everyone else desire for their lives. His happiness and realization is not what consumerism and materialism can give to his life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ3fX1tEgVk

Overall, I can say that’s the way I think as well. I can’t be happy or think that what society has to offer can fill my life, even though they try to make you believe that. There is something else beyond what we can see, there is something else beyond what we can feel, and there is certainly something else beyond what we can have. If we find our essence, we can find our purpose in life and live for it.