Re: de haut en bas
Bethany M. Edstrom (Bethany.M.Edstrom@Dartmouth.EDU)
Wed, 21 Jan 1998 21:37:12 -0500 (EST)
A fact: J.D. Salinger wouldn't last five minutes on a list like this. He would
lose patience with all of us at all ends of the
grammar-punctuation-intellectual-anti-intellectual spectrum. Holden would find
most of us phony, I think, and Seymour would yell at us in elevators.
The act that we are engaged in--discussing literature--is a trap for phoniness.
We know each other in no other area of life other than the little boxes of our
computer screen. Cyberspace may be infinite, but the reality of living with it
is pretty limiting.
Scottie makes the valid point that Salinger's characters refused to accept
anything less than excellence. ecas amends this to "purity": I think both are
correct. Something in this drive to live our lives for the Fat Lady, to drive
ourselves crazy saying our own personal versions of the Jesus prayer--appeals
to us and obsesses us.
But face it--Salinger's characters are not models of social behavior. Neither,
from what I hear, is Salinger. Those of us who are writers can try to model our
writing after his if we want to, but I think it is ill advised to use Salinger
(or his characters) as models for how we should treat each other.
We spent last week talking about how the Glass siblings never grow up. We don't
need to follow their example.
Truce, okay?