Spring Fever

The delicate new blossoms on my plum tree are being ravaged today by a motley band of bees, flies and wasps in orgiastic frenzy. I wish the flowers had more time to grow up.

Heralds of Spring

The sun came out briefly this afternoon and pushed out a few white plum blossoms,

then cast a pinkness across the southern clouds and horizon.

For a Eulogy or a Wedding Toast --(Did Salinger think he was a Buddhist or a poet?)

J.D. Salinger wrote a short story entitled "Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters."

The title of the story is the first line of a message left by Boo Boo Glass for Seymour on the bathroom mirror of the family's apartment, which Buddy discovers towards the end of the story. The message itself begins with a line taken from Sappho's fragment LP 111:

“Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man.”

Here's a eulogy someone wrote drawing from the line:

“In Medieval times, when a great man was soon to travel from one domicile to another, it was customary to alert forthcoming hosts to prepare to house a VERY consequential guest, a person of value and stature. Heaven should prepare now to raise high its roof beams.”

More quotations from Salinger’s works.

• You know that song, 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'?'"
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 22

• "It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!... It's a poem. By Robert Burns.'"
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 22

• "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 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."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 22

• "I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind.... It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24

• "This fall I think you're riding for - it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24

• "Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24

http://classiclit.about.com/od/catcherintherye/a/aa_catcherquote_2.htm

I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

“Then the carousel started, and I watched her go round and round...All the kids tried to grap for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she's fall off the goddam horse, but I didn't say or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it is bad to say anything to them."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

“Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will. -Holden Caulfield"
— J.D. Salinger

“Don't you think I have sense enough to worry about my motives for saying the prayer? That's exactly what's bothering me so. Just because I'm choosy about what I want - in this case, enlightenment or peace, instead or money or prestige or game or any of those things, doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I'm more so!"
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he ever wrong?"
— J.D. Salinger (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction)

“I would like you to clear up for me just what the hell your motives are for saying it." He hesitated, but not long enough to give Franny a chance to cut in on him. "As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who's greedy for material treasure--or even intellectual treasure--and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure's treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.""
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"However contradictory the coroner's report - whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death - isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience."
— J.D. Salinger

"But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they’re brilliant and creative to begin with—which, unfortunately, is rarely the case—tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

:What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
— J.D. Salinger

"Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"But quilt is guilt. It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood, I'm certain - it's roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean that it can't be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use, before it gets around to paralyzing you."
— J.D. Salinger (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction)

"If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

'Are you a poet?' he asked.
'A poet?' Nicholson said. 'Lord, no. Alas, no. Why do you ask?'
'I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.' "
— J.D. Salinger (Nine Stories)

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/819789.J_D_Salinger

That's Vanity

Walker Percy does a short jog, working up a sweat, in French despair a la Camus, and finds a glimpse of God. Cormac McCarthy trudges in agony for a lifetime and finds nothing.




[This dramatic reading shows the screenwriters' faithful but creative adaptation of the original.]

To watch video, try this link:

http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/language_tips/auvideo/2008-03/14/content_6537967.htm

I shouldn't diminish Percy's effort, though his happy ending in The Moviegoer seems an aim at Hollywood comedy a la The Graduate rather than Christian optimism. Here's a few more lines from the novel:

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place-but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.

And the novel's epigraph taken from Kierkegaard:

. . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.

I Hate Plastic and Subdivisions

“Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.”

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

An Ordinary Catholic Woman

The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy

Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man’s world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It is a bargain struck at the very beginning in which she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad. She is as wary of good fortune as she is immured against the bad, and sometimes I seem to catch sight of it in her eyes, this radical mistrust: an old knowledgeable gleam, as old and sly as Eve herself. Losing Duval, her favorite, confirmed her in her election of the ordinary. No more heart’s desire for her, thank you. After Duval’s death she has wanted everything colloquial and easy, even God.

"But now do you know what he wants to do? Fast and abstain during Lent." Her eyes narrow. Here is the outrage. "He weighs eighty pounds and he has one foot in the grave and he wants to fast." She tells it as a malignant joke on Lonnie and God. For a second she is old Eve herself.

This Explains Everything Part 3

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini

Salesmen, advertisers and other compliance professionals manipulate us through use of these six principles of persuasion:
--our human sense of reciprocity
--need for internal commitment/consistency
--attraction to scarcity
--being influenced by liking someone or something,
--appeals to authority, and
--social proofs.