Tomorrow I want to tell you about a new project I'm under taking. I'm very excited about it.
Every year I try to reread Catcher in the Rye. Ever since I read it, I completely related to it on a level I didn't before. It's one of the only books I consistently reread, and each time it still feels like the first time, or at least some kind of fuzzy memory that actually happened to me so long ago.
Last night I wound up making a few fun mistakes, and finished cleaning up my room and decided now, after all that's been happening and everything that's been going on in my life, that now was probably one of the most precise and perfect times to reread Catcher.
The thing about it, why I reread it (I'm getting sick of using that word) is to see how much, if at all, I've progressed since I last cracked it open. There's a draw to that book that I can't really say I have that with many books, and none of the books I feel an intimate draw towards has this specific draw. There's something of a sleeper rebellion begging to be seen, it's the one book that will always defy time and age. I truly believe that. I truly believe that within those pages lays a character so goddamned engaging, timeless and direct...
Most protagonists are built up in such a way, you'd think they were the offspring of Jesus Christ. They shit gold and it smells like roses dipped in CK One. Nothing they do is wrong or flawed. That's not engaging, that's not personal, and while sometimes that makes for a good read it doesn't have the staying power as Catcher's Holden.
Other times the writer tries to make the protagonist the worst guy or girl you could imagine, and then somewhere along the line your supposed to fall head over heals in love with the sap, and all is well and fine. Again, sometimes that's cool to read but it isn't a declaration to something that's going to live well past the moment you hit 'enter' and submitted it to the literary world.
But Salinger doesn't try any of that with Holden. Instead, he just presents a character that's caught in a phase and state of mind that's so difficult to remove yourself from. A quite literal madman, and victim of his circumstances. That's something I can relate to. That invisible wall is one day I face all the time, and wish to cross but have no clue what to do. I'm still waiting to be an adult, and rarely realize that, "Oh shit...I'm 23."
And I get that sense from Holden, too. He's caring and empathetic, but not about himself at all. He stands on his own two feet, and when he's done with something...he searches for something to make sure that's the end, and just moves along.
I had a person very close to me for many years. She used to say I had the Holden Syndrome. I wish I still had the story she wrote about me, because it kind of broke my heart, but the way she wrote it, at that time showed how she cared and felt about me. It's a weird moment for a writer to have something written about him, in the terms of fiction. It's something I wish I could find, because I'd actually love to post it.
It was my birthday, which...birthdays aren't really my thing. My own birthday, I mean. Yours is okay. I'm fine with yours, and if I have the dough, I'd love to buy you a round. You deserve it. You really do.
But the character, I shouldn't say it was me exactly, but the character based on me, it was his birthday. He keeps recalling these whirlwind moments, and the girl based off of her. He keeps wishing he knew the right things to say to her, because she's left his life romantically, but instead at the end of the story he shrugs his shoulders as he enters his party and says, "Oh well. I hope there's cake."
And I don't know. From a purely observational stand point, I could see what she was saying about the character, and ultimately me. It was almost like a...plea to see this, and to snap out of it, but an ultimate knowledge that the character himself was doomed from the start. That some of us are lost causes, and yet somehow we still manage to stick out sometimes.
I feel like I've matured exponentially. I know that there's a long road ahead, and a lot of things that I need to accomplish soon. I can't say I no longer feel like that book is prophecy, that at one point it was but now...it isn't as much.
And there's a part of me that longs for that nostalgia of when I was 15 and read that book for the first time. How it hit me like a hammer, and I found myself searching for every "Fuck You" painted everywhere, and trying to scratch it out.
There's a part of me that wants to hold tight to that feeling, and strangle every second out of it, and not make a single change along the way. To absorb it deeper, and relish the fact that even though these are mistakes...all the phonies who say things like "grand" still meant more to me than the air I breathe. That I've been taken for everything I was worth from a hooker, and all I wanted to do was talk. That I had to pay someone to just listen, and not fuck. That some pimp put me on my ass. To cross every street on a gray day, and feel like every street that I was crossing, that I was disappearing.
I've went down this road. Not even intentionally, but I realize it later on. I just haphazardly wind up drunk on park benches at midnight when it's freezing, and having no idea how I'm getting home. Constantly feeling depressed, or that my mind was violently slipping away.
It's a revolution that keeps replaying, and keeps finding it's mark nearly 60 years after it's creation. This is scripture, this is the bible, and this is a warning sign of what can lay in front of me. A cautionary tale that you can't help but love for everything it's worth, and then some. It's sin and salvation in 214 pages.
Holden Caufield was right. You could spend an entire lifetime trying to erase every "Fuck You" in the world, and never even begin to make a dent in it.
-Until tomorrow.
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