WEBVTT

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How are we doing?

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I think I'll finish up with one
last short essay on knowability

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and unknowability
and all of that.

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It's a short essay on JD
Salinger, of all people,

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but it's less about Salinger and
more about those Rothian themes

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that we began with, I hope.

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And it's called "Love This,"
which probably doesn't

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make a lot of sense
out of context

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from the book in
general, but so be it.

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"Love This."

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One of my clearest,
happiest memories

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is of myself at 14,
sitting up in bed,

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being handed a large glass of
warm buttermilk by my mother

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because I had a sore throat.

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And she's saying
how jealous she was

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that I was reading The Catcher
in the Rye for the first time.

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As have so many other unpopular,
oversensitive American

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teenagers over the
last 60 years I

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memorized the crucial
passages of the novel

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and carried it around
with me wherever I went.

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The following year,
my older sister

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said that Catcher was good,
very good in its own way,

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but that it was really time to
move on now to Nine Stories.

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So I did.

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My identification with
Seymour in "A Perfect

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Day for Bananafish"
was extreme enough

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that my mother scheduled
a few sessions for me

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with a psychologist
friend of hers.

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And "For Esmé--

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With Love and Squalor"
remains, for me,

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an example of
literary perfection.

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In college, I judged
every potential girlfriend

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according to how well she
measured up to Frannie

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in Frannie and Zooey.

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In graduate school,
under the influence

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of Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters and Seymour--

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an Introduction, I got so
comma-happy, italics-happy,

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and parentheses-happy
one semester

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that my pages bore less
resemblance to prose fiction

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than to a kind of
newfangled Morse code.

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When I can't sleep, I get up
and pull a book off the shelves.

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There are no more than 30
writers whom I can reliably

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turn to in this situation, and
Salinger is still one of them.

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I've read each of his books
at least a dozen times.

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What is it in his work
that offers such solace

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at 3:00 AM of the soul?

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For me, it's how his voice,
to a different degree

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in a different way in every
book, talks back to itself,

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how it listens to
itself talking,

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comments upon what it
hears, and keeps talking.

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This self-awareness,
this self-reflexivity

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is the pleasure and
burden of being conscious.

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And the gift of Salinger's
work, what makes me less lonely

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and makes life more livable,
lies in its revelation

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that this is not a
deformation in how I think.

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This is how human beings think.

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