When I was in England, I realized that a lot of my expectations of that had been formed through the Christy Miller books; particularly the last couple in the series, when she goes to England as part of a missions trip. That wasn�t as much about the landmarks or whatever, but just about the lifestyle and the culture.
For both places, though, there were certain things that I expected, certain ways I expected the landscape and the scenery to look, certain ways that I expected people to act, or whatever. It wasn�t even a situation where I spent weeks before I left researching the area, reading tour books, or whatever. It�s just that those books formed my first �real� impressions of them when I was 12 years old, and ever since then, I�ve sort of expected things to be a certain way. Some of it was what I thought it would be; some wasn�t. Life is never exactly like a book.
There are certain phrases, too, that I remember from books that I read. Phrases that I don�t necessarily use in real life, but ones that I often use, in my head, to describe a situation. Phrases like, �With a smile on her freshly-kissed lips,� �Peculiar treasure,� or �God is weird and we are tweaked.� Even the idea of taking a backseat to someone, and having that actually physically happen in a car is a reflection of a scene in a book. Sometimes it�s not the actual words that I remember, but it tends to be more the idea behind it, and the symbolism is increased for me because of it.
Anyways� they say that books take you away; that they open new worlds and introduce you to new friends, and that�s totally true, but they can also influence the way you think and talk in �real life.� It�s interesting to think what impacts us.
infinite || abyss