When I was young – fifteenish – I wanted to DATE Holden Caulfield. Now that I am old – thirty-fourish – I realize that I WAS Holden Caulfield. In a sense, maybe we were all Holden; depressed, wishing for a life with more meaning, longing to escape the phonies of horrible schools and seedy bars and trendy cultural events.
In a sense, I guess I’m still Holden. At least, I still pay a lot of attention to the phony things and phony people and it still bothers me tremendously. Of course, these days I can MOSTLY chalk things up to the wonderful, colorful personalities of various people, but when I’m not doing that; people still depress the hell out of me.
Like Friday night. I was sitting in a bar I’ve been in a thousand times and, after consuming too much alcohol, I started my usual worrying over the people who have been hanging out there for a hundred years. Not all of them. But the ones I have known since I was 24. The ones who just keep drinking and lingering in the fading dingy atmosphere and telling the same stories over and over, never getting better, or different, or going anywhere.
I got so worried about them that I went home and called a certain person to come over and explain to me why I couldn’t save the bar people. I made him understand that I desperately needed him to explain to me why on earth was I still worrying about them all these years later, even after I give them up over and over and over again.
I was sort of crying, even. For them – and TRUTHFULLY – for my own lengthy list of failures as well as theirs.
(It’s a love affair of sorts. I know. Why do the sad, hopeless people tug at our hearts more than the happy people?)
Good fellow that he is, he showed up like a fast-as-lightning Superman to the rescue, and his patient, sensible, understanding, matter-of-factness eased my worrying and silly tears.
(It’s why I like him best. Sorry. Still can’t help it.)
But, in the words of the immortal Holden: I’m a madman sometimes. I really am. Especially when I sit for too long in seedy bars and reflect on the people around me. And now – again – when I start writing about it. I feel a twinge of that same feeling that hit me on Friday night. What can I do with all these people? What am I to do with them? I can’t change them or help them or insult them by trying. So what can one do with the weight of them? What can one do with the weight of our own failings?
Full circle! Bringing it back around!
There’s a lesson here and it relates to Catcher in the Rye. Holden felt the same kind of frustration I am blathering on about. The world is nice, but the world is lousy, too. People can be great, but people can suck and give you a pain in the ass. People fail you right and left, but you fail, too. Holden had trouble living with it. He always wants to get away from it, but then doesn’t because he can’t. His own confusion and stumbling adolescence blocks his way.
Then his TB, of course.
The book is funny. I still laugh out loud while I am reading this one. Holden’s casual observations about the people around him are always truthful – always glaringly so. This last time reading it, I found myself wondering about Salinger’s real thoughts on Catcher in the Rye. Certainly, it wasn’t the best of his works. It is the most readable and the funniest, and that’s why it gained all the attention, but Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters were much better novels. Catcher will always be more famously known for being controversial in schools, and also the book that Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon, was reading at the time of his arrest.
Holden is raging a losing battle against the inane and senseless. The adult world and the child world are too separate; too distinct, with one being all good and the other all bad…in Holden’s mind anyway. In the end, he has a nervous breakdown. Suffering from too many griefs, too much adolescent angst, and a sharp and discerning mind that leaves him with the inability to to just suck it up and get through life, it’s no wonder he’s the literary hero of misunderstood teens everywhere. He was mine, too. But like I said; I = him.
So what can one do? Grow older, I guess. Learn to live with it, I guess. The only thing that gets easier is that you learn, after a while, is that most things can be lived with. Even if it isn’t always pretty or what we want. And all those people I worry about? I don’t know what will become of them, but then, I don’t know what will become of me, either.
