How are we doing?
I think I'll finish up with one last short essay on knowability
and unknowability and all of that.
It's a short essay on JD Salinger, of all people,
but it's less about Salinger and more about those Rothian themes
that we began with, I hope.
And it's called "Love This," which probably doesn't
make a lot of sense out of context
from the book in general, but so be it.
"Love This."
One of my clearest, happiest memories
is of myself at 14, sitting up in bed,
being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother
because I had a sore throat.
And she's saying how jealous she was
that I was reading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time.
As have so many other unpopular, oversensitive American
teenagers over the last 60 years I
memorized the crucial passages of the novel
and carried it around with me wherever I went.
The following year, my older sister
said that Catcher was good, very good in its own way,
but that it was really time to move on now to Nine Stories.
So I did.
My identification with Seymour in "A Perfect
Day for Bananafish" was extreme enough
that my mother scheduled a few sessions for me
with a psychologist friend of hers.
And "For Esmé--
With Love and Squalor" remains, for me,
an example of literary perfection.
In college, I judged every potential girlfriend
according to how well she measured up to Frannie
in Frannie and Zooey.
In graduate school, under the influence
of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour--
an Introduction, I got so comma-happy, italics-happy,
and parentheses-happy one semester
that my pages bore less resemblance to prose fiction
than to a kind of newfangled Morse code.
When I can't sleep, I get up and pull a book off the shelves.
There are no more than 30 writers whom I can reliably
turn to in this situation, and Salinger is still one of them.
I've read each of his books at least a dozen times.
What is it in his work that offers such solace
at 3:00 AM of the soul?
For me, it's how his voice, to a different degree
in a different way in every book, talks back to itself,
how it listens to itself talking,
comments upon what it hears, and keeps talking.
This self-awareness, this self-reflexivity
is the pleasure and burden of being conscious.
And the gift of Salinger's work, what makes me less lonely
and makes life more livable, lies in its revelation
that this is not a deformation in how I think.
This is how human beings think.