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I am addicted to reading. As I used to tell my mother when I was a child, I could read the cereal box on the table if there is nothing else to read. I need it like a fix that will open up in my mind the horizons of what life is supposed to be and give me ideas about how to make that happen--how to help myself and others realize what the better life is on this earth and who can help us to create that more perfect place.Whether a writer helps us to grow our imaginations and identify with his/her world of imaginary beings who will sink into our brains like seedlings into fresh soil or whether the writer will help us to see exactly what this world is like and how it functions, their work never ends.
It lives and grows not just in us but in the people who come after us. It does not age in the same way we do but has a completely different life trajectory.
I never say Seymour with saying see more glass. That is not just a callow reminder of how playful Salinger could be but because he understood what a child's world does with language and how that inner world can affect us all.
I remember sitting in a religious school classroom when the teacher at our synagogue talked about why our schools would not let us read Catcher in the Rye and that it had to do with some of the language despite the fact, as he reminded us, everyone who objected to that language used it all the time.
But on the other end of the spectrum, from the fictive to the nonfiction, there is Howard Zinn. He did not disappear on us and did not stop the fights for us that we all need now to do in his honor at all times and with great diligence. If you have not read his book, The People's History of the United States, then you have not given yourself the privilege of understanding what truly happened in this country, on the soil you tread on and in the workings of the government we have inherited.
I hate to think that they are not among us. Just as I hated it when Vonnegut died. It made me angry because there was more to be done. While Vonnegut had renounced fiction, he became a tireless speaker for the far left and its agenda and we need more of those people among us. Just like Zinn, he was there and saw a great deal.
Salinger did avoid us, leave us, abandon us, we could say all of that, but those wonderful stories are present and live inside me and anyone who has read them. Imagine a world without the Glass family, without knowing Holden and his angry and bitter need to wipe out the cardinal sin of his day--phoniness.
We don't necessarily use the same words today. But we do know what it feels like to be an adolescent disgusted with how the looming world of adulthood is going to tempt us to the point where we will give in, we will have no choice.
May all these gifted writers find their heavenly peace and know what they gave to so many people they never met and never wanted to meet.
I thank them all.
