In Which I Contemplate Pirates

I went to a reading last night by Sara Levine, a former professor at Iowa. She was reading from her first novel, a narrative about a twenty something girl who reads Treasure Island and decides to live her life by the four principles presented: boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing. The horn-blowing alone reveals the book to be a bit of a spoof. But what I found most interesting was her conception of how it is possible to change, to get up one day and do things differently. I've tried to do something similar. It didn't work particularly well.
As difficult as it is to take seriously a narrator who believes that horn-blowing is the answer to all her problems (she really does, in a way) , there is something vulnerable about her that is very familiar. She has the same fear that today will fade into tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, that individuality is an illusion perpetuated by modern society. The definition of reality is something that, I think, comes only with an awareness self... Something that is not easy to come by. It is not just an awareness of thought, desire, or feeling. It is something that only comes from acknowledging that I, as a person, as an individual, am very, very small part of the cosmos. As a single atom in a human being, or an electron in a molecule, we are pinpricks in the vastness of space and time. Awareness of thought, desire, and feeling is important; they are what define our connections to the space and time in which we experience reality. So many things in everyday life feel like the end of the world. And I suppose, that for individual realities, disconnected from the larger context (like a novel), the piratic principles of Treasure Island could have some potential.
So. This novel was a thought exercise. And a parody, a commentary, a question: How do we as humans in modern society affect change in ourselves? I don't know the answer. But it's an interesting thing to think about...