And as I stumbled onto Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, it was the first time I had ever read any sort of philosophy that really made a tremendous amount of sense. What I liked that was missing from my experience of Christianity growing up was a sort of acceptance, a sort of being OK with being imperfect and not focusing on the sin.
Growing up in Poland, I didn't have the experience of going to Disneyland as a child, so I don't have any childhood memories connected to it, good or bad.
I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. And I was. I was growing up middle-class in a time when growing up middle-class in America meant there would be jobs for my parents, good schools for me to prepare myself for a career, and, if I worked hard and played by the rules, a chance for me to do anything I wanted.
At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything - in other words, utter savages.
Twenty years ago I wanted to move to a nice place so our Charley would grow up a nice boy and learn a profession. But instead we live in a jungle, so he can only be a wild animal. D'you think I picked the East Side like Columbus picked America?
Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.
I got my influences from 70s bands - Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, blah blah blah. When I was growing up, we had all these crazy bands on the Top 40. Today, if Pink Floyd released "Money", it wouldn't even get played.