Blue Satellite

(I feel like this topic has been talked about better in other articles. Also, this is just what I've learned and how it applies to me. I interchange between Tanakh and Torah here.)

A few months ago I came across something interesting on reddit. It was a user discussing his favourite fanfic author and the patterns she (the author) noticed in her writing. I can’t recall the details perfectly, and since I’m not Jewish I might sadly get something wrong somewhere, which I apologize for in advance. But he said that she said that, someone had to point out to her the similarity between her style of writing and the style of writing in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible). Basically, they brought up the fact that her stories read with the same rhythm as the scriptures do (I’m assuming it’s the English translation and not the original Hebrew/Aramaic the Torah is written in). She found this comment funny in a roundabout way because she’d grown up reading the Tanakh and didn’t know that, even though she’d left the religion years ago, her work still reflected how key a part the scriptures played in her younger years.

I forgot about this reddit situation until I re-read The Catcher in the Rye some days ago.

Now, I’m introducing my cringy past here, but from the ages of 14 to about 17, I worshipped TCINR. As an angst-ridden, very much depressed teen, I held Holden holy. I thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread. After 17 I got busy, and never really picked the book up again. On the last page there’s this line that goes, ‘God, I wish you could’ve been there’. Before that Holden’s standing alone in the rain, monologuing about how nice his younger sister looks riding a carousel, how happy he is just watching her go round and round on her plastic horse. He’s crying. He ends his monologue with that line; ‘God, I wish you could’ve been there’ and it’s usually by this time I start crying too.

The thing is when I read it a few days ago, I suddenly recalled this short story I wrote in early 2019. It’s about a girl who’s trying to deal with her splintering family in the aftermath of her sister’s death. At the end of it her mother starts rearranging everything in their house due to her grief, and the main character comes to some special kind of realization while watching her mother frantically move things about. Later that night she sees her dead older sister in her dreams and tells her how, while watching their mother pace up and down, that was ‘The Moment’ for her. Her dead sister doesn’t understand what ‘The Moment’ is supposed to mean. The MC says something about her obviously not understanding if she wasn’t there to see what she saw.

Then, believe it or not, I actually end that story with, ‘God, if only she’d been there to see it’.

So, yeah, that's the climax of whatever I'm rambling about here. I unwittingly stole a line from TCINR. And now I’m thinking that if TCINR has this much influence over me, I probably have the Quran buried in my psyche the way that author has the Torah buried in hers. Growing up Muslim meant being introduced to the Quran at a very early age. As none of us at home understood Arabic, we read English translations by the side, and covered the book back to front, front to back, everyway everywhere.

I’ve not gone looking through my other stories for patterns or pilfered phrases or things like that. I never even considered holy books as…something more than just a compilation of rules guiding how you should live your life, until I watched V for Vendetta and one of the characters - Evey’s boss - referred to the Quran as ‘poetry’. I thought, well if you want to call it that, go ahead, but the next day I googled things and came to many conclusions that I shall not write here in fear of making this entry longer and more complex than I'd like it to be.

It’s just something I’m more aware of now, that what you read (the most) when you’re younger kind of rears its head up in places you wouldn’t expect it to.