I do not own anything from TKAM except my own thoughts and triggered annotations of the book. This is simple, hardly like a complex story, but anyway./ qwaeey
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Atticus – The growing up of Jem.
Sometimes I looked back and I tried to remember how was it when I was young, when I was exactly like Scout and Jem and Dill. How worry-free the situation was then, there were so many things in the humdrum schedule to be taken as usual. Prejudice was not uncommon and there was nothing to strive for - the mooching of people in the squares and slow, romantic courtships that fluttered by drying flowers.
I just watched Jem throw the camellia down. It was a beautiful object, a white silky thing with wide petals that graces its bud like an ornate pillow. It was queer to watch him reject his childhood, his thinking, and learn to accept the good and bad of others; throw aside the immaturity like a cave that he was slowly emerging from. It was queer to watch him battle with the thousand emotions pressing him down, urgently compressing his feelings of judgment and good and evil; to see him realize that the world was two-sided after all.
Was I ever something like that? I can't remember - but the world is all too complex now with the hatred we throw to Negroes and the depressing situation and financial crisis. We cannot look back at childhood and marvel about ourselves. We can only sit back and watch the next generation hopefully take a different path from us.