A Great Way to Pass the Time.
There's something undeniably satisfying about discovering personal details of complete strangers, whether it's by eavesdropping on a conversation to which you are not (technically) privy or finding an illegible letter drenched in rain on the concrete pavement, where even the handwriting has meaning. And every once in a lifetime, if you're lucky enough to come across an (unintentionally) abandoned diary, in which the puzzles of the writer's secrets and regrets are more fruitful and mysterious than the conversation overheard on the steps of the museum, the find feels like it was just as much your destiny as it was theirs. Curiosity is invoked, your imagination soars, and the stranger becomes a little less strange and a little more like someone you might want to share your own secrets with. Enjoy!
It always comes back to J.D. Salinger. He touched a cord of bitterness we didn't even know we felt. Or was it a keen sense of hopelessness, knowing that even if we hitchhiked to California, we would still have to write at night-that is, if we wanted to eat. And so that that job which fed us would begin to consume us, feeding our partners, and then our children, and soon we were too tired to write even a page. But we had the kids, and sometimes that is enough. Civilization advanced another generation.
ReplyDeleteBTW, Salinger was a supreme egoist who sacraficed much, and many. But he gave us Catcher in the Rye. Your choice.
Oh,one last thing: Holden was talking from the bed of an asylum, recuperating from a nervous breakdown over the death of his brother...