New Years Wishes from 2GreenEnergy

I want to wish everyone Happy New Year, and at the same time commemorate the birthday of J. D. Salinger, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, featuring the alienated teenager Holden Caulfield.  There are two main theories that explain the book’s intense popularity (and then there’s mine):

• The book was broadly and immediately censored, especially by parents, largely for Holden’s more-or-less continuous swearing. Is there anything that parents forbid that isn’t immediately successful? When I left for college, I wonder how I would have reacted if my parents had ordered me:  “Now you be sure to smoke plenty of pot when you get up there, son.  Promise? Don’t you even think of disappointing us now.”

• It was one of the first really good depictions of a nonconforming young person.  Yes, that sounds like a snooze today, but understand that this was before Rebel Without a Cause, The Graduate, and literally thousands of other (lesser) attempts to make this point in the last half of the 20th Century.

As I mentioned, I have my own theory, though as usual, I don’t expect to win any awards for it:  The book would not have had its impact without its end, where Holden, the protagonist who’s shown nothing but contempt for a world full of phony people and bogus institutions, astonishes the reader when he casually reveals that he’s as deeply real and compassionate as anyone you or I have ever known.  Here are some of the closing words, in which he responds to his kid sister Phoebe, who had asked him what he’d like to do in his life:

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.

Some of us are suited to music or history where others have a thing for math and science. We all have our personal philosophies about our perceived responsibilities to those around us.   The world is full of seven billion people who together represent the widest imaginable variety of personalities, talents, and sensibilities.  But there are very, very few among us who don’t love the idea of helping another out of harm’s way.

Thanks for being one of the good guys, and again, Happy New Year.