"Then something terrible happened just as I got in the park. I dropped old Phoebe's record. It broke into about fifty pieces. It was in a big envelope and all, but it broke anyway. I damn near cried, it made me feel so terrible, but all I did was, I took the pieces out of the envelope and put them in my coat pocket. They weren't good for anything, but I didn't feel like throwing them away. Then I went in the park. Boy, was it dark."
I read J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye for the first time last night. It was not at all what I expected, which is reasonable considering how in/famous the novel is.
I don't wish to attempt a critical analysis. I can only say that I cried which made me feel alive and "goddam depressed" at the same time.
"Then I told her about the record. 'Listen, I bought you a record,' I told her. 'Only I broke it on the way home.' I took the pieces out of my coat pocket and showed her. 'I was plastered,' I said.
'Gimme the pieces,' she said. 'I'm saving them.' She took them right out of my hand and then she put them in the drawer of the night table. She kills me."
Posted by kurt at June 3, 2003 2:09 PM"She answered the phone and kept saying hello. My voice wouldn't work. She very nearly hung up. If only I could calm down a little... I really called to ask her, to beg her for the last time to just go off alone with me and get married. I'm too keyed up to be with people. I feel as though I'm about to be born. Sacred, sacred day. The connection was so bad, and I couldn't talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back 'What?'"
- excerpt from Seymour's diary; 'Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters' by JD Salinger.
"Anyway, one beautiful spring evening when we were still living over on Riverside Drive, Bessie sent me to the drugstore for a couple of quarts of ice cream. I came out of the building at that very same magical quarter hour described just a few paragraphs back. Equally fatal to the construction of this anecdote, I had sneakers on - sneakers surely being to anyone who happens to be the Fastest Boy Runner in the World almost exactly what red shoes were to Hans Christian Andersen's little girl. Once I was clear of the building, I was Mercury himself, and broke into a "terrific" sprint up the long block to Broadway. I took the corner at Broadway on one wheel and kept going, doing the impossible: increasing speed. The drugstore that sold Louis Sherry ice cream, which was Bessie's adamant choice, was three blocks north, at 113th. About halfway there, I tore past the stationery store, where we usually bought our newspapers and magazines, but blindly, without noticing any acquaintances or relatives in the vicinity. Then, about a block farther on, I picked up the sound of pursuit at my rear, plainly conducted on foot. My first, perhaps typcially New Yorkese thought was that the cops were after me - the charge, conceivably, Breaking Speed Records on a Non-School-Zone Street. I strained to get a little more speed out of my body, but it was no use. I felt a hand clutch out at me and grab hold of my sweater just where the winning-team numerals should have been and, good and scared, I broke my speed with the awkwardness of a gooney bird coming to a stop. My pursuer was, of course, Seymour, and he was looking pretty damned scared himself. "What's the matter? What happened?" he asked me frantically. He was still holding on to my sweater. I yanked myself loose from his hand and informed him, in the rather scatological idiom of the neighborhood, which I won't record here verbatim, that nothing had happened, nothing was the matter, that I was just running, for cryin' out loud. His relief was prodigious. "Boy, did you scare me!" he said. "Wow, were you moving! I could hardly catch up with you!" We then went along, at a walk, to the drugstore together. Perhaps strangely, perhaps not strangely at all, the morale of the now Second-Fastest Boy Runner in the World had not been very perceptibly lowered. For one thing, I had been outrun by him. Besides, I was extrememly busy noticing that he was panting a lot. It was oddly diverting to see him pant."
- excerpt from 'Seymour, An Introduction' by JD Salinger
He kills me.
Posted by: susana at June 17, 2003 3:40 PM
i do not know what to say but please write something to me because i need it
Posted by: leyla at July 3, 2004 8:54 AM
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