:27:01
"This is a people shooting hat."
:27:04
"I shoot people in this hat."
:27:09
This book is preparing people for bigger
moments than I had ever dreamed of.
:27:13
Then, on page 89,
"I'd rather push a guy out the window
:27:18
or chop his head off with an axe
than sock him in the jaw."
:27:22
"I hate fistfights. What scares
me most is the other guy's face."
:27:29
I finished the book.
It's touching and comic.
:27:32
The boy wants to do so much
and can't do anything.
:27:35
Hates all phoniness
and only lies to others.
:27:38
Wants everyone to like him but is only
hateful and is completely self involved.
:27:44
In other words, a pretty accurate
picture of a male adolescent.
:27:51
What alarms me about the book - not the
book so much as the aura about it - is this.
:27:58
The book is primarily about paralysis.
The boy can't function.
:28:01
At the end, before he can run away and
start a new life, it starts to rain. He folds.
:28:08
There's nothing wrong in writing about
emotional and intellectual paralysis.
:28:12
It may, thanks to Chekhov and Samuel
Beckett, be the great modern theme.
:28:17
The extraordinary last lines
of Waiting for Godot.;
:28:21
"Let's go."
:28:23
"Yes."
:28:24
"Let's go."
:28:25
Stage directions:
:28:28
"They do not move."
:28:31
The aura around Salinger's book -
:28:33
which, perhaps, should be
read by everyone but young men - is this.
:28:36
It mirrors like a fun-house mirror,
:28:38
and amplifies like a distorted speaker
one of the great tragedies of our times -
:28:43
the death of the imagination.
:28:46
Because what else is paralysis?
:28:49
The imagination has been
so debased that imagination...
:28:55
being imaginative, rather than
being the linchpin of our existence,
:28:59
now stands as a synonym for
something outside ourselves.