> >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 ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com