One Story

After spending the day reading "Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters" I am left with only one conclusion:

It's embarrassing to unconsciously laugh out loud in a crowed cafe!!

But in all seriousness, today passed in the most deliciously languid way. While I sat here - enveloped in a faux leather chair, my legs bent under me, knees crushing painfully hour after hour against the arm of this coffee house easy chair - I ate, slept and wept for everything Salinger was. . . and wasn't.

There is a particular strangeness, a very indiscernible quality, to everything he has penned. It reaches out to the reader in a way that simultaneously validates and alienates him. Much like trying to dive into Salinger himself, we can't help but be left with the feeling that no matter how close we get, no matter how deep we are allowed to gaze into the psyche of the men and women within the pages we will never fully understand them.

It is in this obscurity though, the aloofness of his characters with their lead door morality, that I find the most condolence. While I have dogged eared, underlined and highlighted many a passage, it is very much the space between the characters and within their identities that resonates.

It is because we are given so much freedom within our own imaginations to play out the motivations of his characters we end up identifying with him so deeply. We are constantly asked to reach out to make those slightly intangible connections between the characters and their actions, between their past and present lives and in doing so we automatically infuse ourselves into the obscure details we are asked to make up. We can’t help but feel, for example in Catcher in the Rye, that young Holden Caulfield’s angst is an angst we know, his anger is an anger we have been driven to; because when it comes to identifying with a story it is not the emotions that need to be universal, but the opportunity to create motivations for those emotions that matters.

I'm not sure I could sum up in so many words, what I adore so much about Salinger’s writing specifically. It could be the way it rolls off the page, so much so it becomes not so much an act of reading, but one of listening. Or it could be the moments of unbearable humour that pop up in-between the moments of intense insight. Or possibly it’s the little details, that become observations of immense meaning and magnitude. For example when Franny Glass was four she believed that she would fly around the apartment when no one was looking. How could this possibly be, she was questioned. Surely she must have only dreamt that she was doing this? But of course it was real, she protested. She knew so because of the dust that was left on her fingers from the tops of the light bulbs. The light bulb dust. . . . of course. There are really only two reasons to even contemplate the tops of light bulbs, if you are changing them, or flying over them.

It is the details, the obscure, simple, or otherwise that we continually take for granted. They are always there, though dulled by the pressing emotional turmoil of immediate needs, wants and desires. Salinger’s characters were ones that through their own genius, acknowledged or not, pointed out these details to us again. These details were a part of their brilliance, were a part of their consciousness in such an ingrained way it allowed them to make the commentaries on people, life, love, loss and hopelessness that we find so profound and meaningful.

But alas the greatest part about reading Salinger may not be the observations made by his characters - but the ones his readers inevitably make about themselves.

J.D Salinger died Wednesday at 91 years of age.

"How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true." - Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters

Thanks J.D.