In remembrance of J.D. Salinger, I'm reposting an entry from October 2008:
This evening I had to write a
short essay on "My Greatest Accomplishment" for a writing job. It
took me a couple of days to figure out what I would be comfortable writing
about. I let my thoughts simmer and then this morning it struck me that so far
my greatest accomplishment is raising my son. It also provided me a perfect
excuse to express some thoughts I had about The Catcher in the Rye a couple of
years ago.
I have a theory that changes
occur in the brain at key life stages – such as marriage and the birth of a
child – that in fact make it impossible to single people to fully understand
married people, and for people who do not have children to understand those who
do.
It was not until I had a son that
I felt I actually understood The Catcher
in the Rye. Having gone to boarding school, I read this book
several times during my youth, and then again in adulthood because I had never
been able to figure it out. Those who have read it will recall that
Holden Caulfield reflects upon an old ballad that goes, “If a body catch a body
coming through the rye.” (It's actually a poem by Robert Burns.) Holden
imagines children playing in a rye field near a cliff, with himself standing at
the edge, ready to catch them so they don’t fall off.
Holden wants to be that catcher
in the rye, but why this is so eluded me until one day I was watching my then
much younger son on a play structure in a park, hovering about in case he
should drop off the edge. Then it occurred to me: as parents, we are all
catchers in the rye.
The Catcher
in the Rye is a tale
of a somewhat neglected child running away from boarding school to go on an
unsupervised spree through New York City, sneaking into his parents’ apartment
at night only to check on his younger sister and grab some clothes. It is
fairly clear that there is a degree of emotional distance between Holden and
his parents. Parenting seems to be the missing element in Holden’s
adolescence; he wishes to be the catcher in the rye, perhaps, because he wishes
for someone to catch him as well.
So is that what The Catcher in
the Rye is all about: a wish for parental love? I'd like to write up a longer
essay on this, but for now it's nice to ponder that I've become the catcher in
the rye.
