The fifth paragraph of “The American Male at Age Ten” is the
start of an exploration into Colin’s psychology. It explains an early memory
turned nostalgia turned hope for the future. This vision of Wyoming to which he
keeps coming back is mostly a dreamy haze that at times “can sound fantastical and
wifty and achingly naïve.” The description of his memory/dream really pulled me
in because it put into words exactly how I’ve felt about certain places I
visited in my childhood. These places tend to be absolutely perfect in my mind
and cause a feeling of being home.
Orlean then goes on to rationalize these dreams about Wyoming for the reader
saying, “The collision in his mind of what he understands, what he hears, what
he figures out, what popular culture pours into him, what he knows, what he
pretends to know, and what he imagines, makes an interesting mess.” First,
Orlean describes a boy’s thoughts to which the readers themselves may
probably relate in their early memory, but then she offers a explanation to why
we think like that. Reading this paragraph, I can imagine both being a ten year
old longing to live on a ranch in Wyoming AND being an adult having a
conversation with a ten year old and being fascinated with how his brain is
functioning and growing.
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