Re: It's like falling in love all over again...
Brendan McKennedy (suburbantourist@hotmail.com)
Fri, 27 Mar 1998 22:07:44 -0800 (PST)
>
>I think it's a shame the way a lot of people `fall out of love' with
Holden
>in the way you've said. It's symptomatic with the worldwide gnawing
disease
>of the adult, Every adult was a
>teenager once. It's just such a shame so few adults seem to remember
that
>fact. Do you remember having to change into a completely physically and
>mentally different person with absolutely no help from anyone ?
What you're saying holds some water, I think, but is different from what
I was describing--starting with the fact that I'm only twenty years old,
and the guy I was tutoring was only about 18 or 19. As a 20-yr-old I DO
remember being a teenager, very much, and I am still undergoing all of
the changes. It's not that I don't "identify" with Holden anymore--and
that was the word I myself used, poorly, in the original post. I do
identify, and I understand him--and I think it is perhaps that teenagers
identify with him on such a visceral level that they can't truly
understand him, anymore than they understand themselves. I'm still
learning about myself, and about Holden through myself--I'm learning
everyday, and I've got a long way to go...but I've gotten far enough to
see that the passion that is part of teenagers isn't necessarily the
best response to this world. Holden was a ruined, wounded individual,
and while identifying may ease the pain of a teenager, it still does not
offer any solutions. If you look at Holden as an adult, he may
assimilate to a degree, only allowing his confusion to truly surface
when he's drunk, like so many of Salinger's characters--or, in short,
like Mr Antolini, who I've come to believe is Salinger's vision of
Holden's adulthood. But if Holden doesn't learn to assimilate, he may
simply die of his passion, or grow entirely antisocial, or--one might
fancy--kill John Lennon. In any event, his passion cannot save the
world. It cannot even save himself.
If one wants to save the world, one mustn't forget the passion, but tame
it as one matures, and look past the evil of humanity to the good that
may or may not be there to be found. If you look at any of the
individuals who have changed the World in any great scale--Christ,
Siddhartha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Junior--they may have been Holden
at some point, but they at some point understood the passion as
destructive and used the energy positively--not through hate or disgust
of humans, as in Holden's case, but through peace and compassion and
optimism.
Brendan
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