I finished High Fidelity recently and I’ve picked up The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck again. This is a book I grew up with; that is that a copy was in my house my whole life and I’ve read it a few times in different periods of my life. The copy I have now is the 25th anniversary addition. Theres an additional forward in this addition where Peck talks about the success of the book. In the original forward of the book he speaks about how it’s “not his book”. It’s left to the reader to decide who’s book it is: a generations, the readers, gods? But he speaks of a lecture he was giving and asking the audience to raise their hand if they’d been involved in professional therapy and over ninety percent of the room does. I feel like the underlying message of that forward is that it was a generation where talking about our problems started to become okay and mainstream even.

I found this interesting and connected to an earlier journal about how many find that my generation and younger are very open about ourselves online and give away a degree of privacy that they hold true. The piece that instigated that writing seems to hold that earlier folks aren’t so much concerned about privacy as they are afraid of what people will think. Peck notes that a friend’s mother spoke of him as the young man the speaks of things that people shouldn’t.

It’s an interesting thread. I find more recent news online, and ask my grandparents to print it for my father who liked Peck even before he found out he was an alcoholic.