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The Quiet World Of Written Words

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The Quiet World of Written Words: How I Discovered Literature It was a time of long hair and stealth window escapes at the midnight hour, a time of skipping class and anti-establishment sentiment spewing forth from my foul, juvenile, remorseless mouth. I was mad without reason. Full of aggressive energy, anger was the emotion with which I chose to express myself. Naturally, I found fuel for the fire in a band named Rage Against the Machine. Front-man Zach de la Rocha put the emotions I was experiencing into a lyrical poetic, militant, rap-core metal form. It was unlike anything I had ever heard before: pure, intellectual, and most of all, unfiltered. Initially, I was drawn to Rage because of its sound and raw musical talent with their …show more content…

Because I could identify with this song, I found myself wondering: Who was this character Tom Joad? Was he flesh as I? Was he even a man, or was he just a ghost after all? I was clueless and perplexed. Consequently, I took it upon my teenage self to venture out in order to discover just who he was. Though I was prepared to comb through every article necessary, a simple Google search was all the elbow grease it took to unearth the mystery: Tom Joad is the main character of a novel written by John Steinbeck, titled “The Grapes of Wrath.” I bought the book, and it was then that I branched out from raging sound waves into the quiet and meticulous world of written words. The year was 2008; and the first decade of the new millennium was drawing to an end on an extraordinarily low point in America’s economic history. What has come to be known as The Great Recession would have led to an apocalyptic collapse of the world economy, had it not been for governmental intervention. The financial crises tattooed drastic and lasting effects on the lives of the majority of Americans; among other things, many lost their homes, savings, and their investments. Needless to say, there was an overall sense of despair throughout the heartland, and the big questions on everyone’s minds were: “What do we do now?” and “Where do we go from here?”
As I read word after word and page after page, I came to the realization that the world in which I lived was in fact not that far from the problems

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