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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday December 16, 2002 Volume IV Number 50 |
FOCUS - The Glass Kids
For several generations now, a goodly number of college seniors have discovered J.D. Salinger. Kevin delivered a copy of Franny and Zooey (a collection of short stories by Salinger) recently and said, “Dad this is a book you’ll like. It’s a quick read. I couldn’t put it down,” he explained. “When you’re done, let’s talk about it.”
Kevin is comin’ ‘round the bend on the home stretch of his college career. He is scheduled to graduate in May. This week, he celebrates his twenty-second birthday. “I don’t know if I should bring this up or not,” I said as we drove across town. “What?” Kevin asked, anticipating my point, as he often does, “… That I’m now officially older than you were when you got married?” He was reading my mind. “Yeah, that’s what I was just thinkin’,” I admitted, astonished at the thought of it, and looking over at my son, remembering quite readily being his age. Then we laughed, one of those father-son laughs that strikes you both at the same time when you stumble over the fact that you really do share the same DNA.
All four years, most every Friday, I’ve made the forty-minute drive down to his campus on the bluff overlooking the blue Pacific (one of the pay-offs of the drive has been the scenery) and we find a place in that beach and harbor community and have lunch together. It has us in the habit of talking about things, and as habits go, this is one of the good ones. So I’ve tracked the evolution of his collegiate years with him, and now graduation day looms large. It’s only a few months away.
Kevin chose business as his major. When you are eighteen, and the banquet table of disciplines is set before you like an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord, it isn’t easy to choose. How do you really know what you want to do with the rest of your life about the time you are just springing loose from high school? I’ve always considered it a pre-mature requirement colleges place on the shoulders of a person barely finishing up teenagehood. Personal opinion: The choice of majors is not really all that critical. Make a choice, but know that the real benefit of your college years will be the introduction to the world of ideas, the capacity to assimilate new material, association with peers going after the same goal (graduation), exposure to real live in-the-flesh scholars, to comprehend concepts, to develop the skills of communicating those new ideas in writing and in speech. If you can prove your ability to get your grades, and bring enough discipline to the task to complete the program leading to a bachelor’s degree, the arena in which you will want to work and earn your way into home and family will emerge as surely as the sunrise, but there’s no need to think that any one particular major is going to box you in. Most of us end up in a life’s work that had little to do with our imaginings we committed to writing (still there) in those High School Senior Year Books.
I once confessed to Kevin that I didn’t really start reading books until I was nineteen. And it’s true. Quite candidly, the books were not often the assigned books, either. They were, rather, books like J.D. Salinger’s that got me looking for a quiet corner, uninterrupted, just a book and me for hours at a time, following a train of thought into worlds of ideas and experience that didn’t really get covered in every-day conversation or tedious lectures, for that matter. But it was the stuff I thought about. I’d find authors who thought about it, too. Those books became like friends. As time passed, I couldn’t toss them out, or give them away. They are, many of them, to this day, still on the shelf and every now and then, I peruse the titles and remember the days when we were pals, and I’d look forward to picking up the volume and turning to the dog-eared page that marked where I left off and we’d continue the conversation. I love good movies. But movies do all the creating for you. The cinematography and the characters are set by the director. When you read a book, the characters and the setting are your own creation, and in a sense, you imagine the world along with the author’s cues. So reading is as much a dialogue as a collection of words on a page. A real writer will capture your mind, maybe even your heart, and then walk with you through a set of circumstances, real people and places, and engage you in an unspoken conversation, enriching your life. Books are like that.
This is the kind of stuff Kev and I talk about over lunch on Fridays.
* * * * * * *
I first noticed the red paperback copy of Catcher in the Rye on a used book table in the bookstore. One of my professors called it a must-read. He hadn’t assigned it in the class, but he referred to the fact that it was one of those cult classics that was widely read on college campuses all over the country. He warned us that the book was peppered with profanities and wasn’t suitable for most church libraries, but even so, had a profound effect on contemporary culture and ought to be read and understood by anyone interested in the mind-set of post-adolescent America.
I purchased my own copy. Back then, I think it set me back about three bucks. Maybe two.
J.D. (Jerome David) Salinger began writing short stories as a high school student. His teachers recognized his gift. His parents, heavy disciplinarians, believed Jerome needed the rigors of military school so that he might “make something of himself” and sent him off to Valley Forge Military Academy. Afterwards, he took some college courses, but never completed a college degree. When the nation went to war, Salinger served as a staff sergeant in the army from 1942 through 1946. When he returned home to New York, he continued to write. His stories were published in Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, and The New Yorker.
He wrote a series of stories about a dysfunctional family who starred in a fifties game show. The Glass family reached celebrity status because of their brilliant performance answering trivia questions on national TV, winning big prizes and displaying an encyclopedic capacity for obscure facts and figures. For Salinger, fame and fortune is risky business. Seymore and Buddy and Franny and Zoey were the brothers and sister raised by a frenetically obsessed mother and an absentee father who all bordered on genius as performers on all the standardized tests but privately, were lost, alone and miserable.
At the age of thirty
one, Salinger published his one and only novel, Catcher in the Rye.
Holden Caulfield narrates, he’s a bright high school student who intentionally
flunks out of his private boarding school and runs away to Manhattan, trying to
find his place in a world of hypocritical adults and institutions that stifle
individual growth. He despises the “phonies” in his world, teachers and
parents and even his older brother. The novel won critical acclaim and became
a classic as perhaps one of the most imaginative, intelligent and sensitive
portrayals of adolescent life in American literature. But it would be his only
novel.
As Catcher in the Rye garnered monumental success, Salinger went into seclusion. He refused interviews. While he wrote every day, the work he accumulated at his rural New Hampshire home would never be published. He considered publishing a “terrible invasion of privacy.” His retreat into a private world only made his work mysterious, and contributed to his cult status.
The recent full length feature film starring Sean Connery called Finding Forrester is largely based on the story of author J.D. Salinger.
So Kevin and I talked about Zooey and Franny, and their struggle to find a meaningful place in a world that falls way short of its ideals. The Glass family is smart, urbane, quick witted, affluent. But the two of them are about to become adults, and fear it enormously. They see so much strife and enmity and greediness and injustice and inconsistency. They hear adults speak of love and generosity and caring but they see so little of it. And they wonder if they want any part of that world at all. In their conversation, they finally conclude that they are facing a spiritual problem.
It surprised me, I had forgotten, but J.D. Salinger (as in The Catcher in the Rye), in an irreverent way, weaves theology into the story of Franny and Zooey, a New Testament theology that brings his characters to the brink of self-destruction, only to discover the power of faith and human caring.
In his classic cult novel which I read when I was Kevin’s age, young Holden Caulfield decided in the end that the only thing really worth while in life was to be there watching the children play in the fields of rye and to protect them from harm, and to be the one watching, to be sure none of them wandered off towards the brink, the edge of the cliff, to catch them and keep them from falling.
The catcher in the rye.
* * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
You didn’t ask for this responsibility. You may have entertained a desire for this kind of influence and this position of authority somewhere back then, but it has taken you by something of a surprise to be here, bearing the weight and the burden of leadership. It just happened.
You remember the idealisms of your younger years. You could spot a hypocrite a mile away. Even today, you are a pretty good judge of character. Now it all seems more complicated. But in those early days, when you had a blank page on your desk, and you knew you could become anything you would like to be, well, those days have faded away into the mist of aging and today you are more the realist. The years of battling for survival have brought you to a different place. But the young ones around you, they are like you were. They are probing, questioning, wondering. They are ready to make a different kind of mark.
Listening to Kevin explore and think and form his own ideas, well, it makes me feel younger again. And it reminds me of the days when it was all so new.
There is still time to make that contribution that no one else can make. It is a spiritual issue. Theology is a part of the fabric that makes your life a colorful tapestry.
Don’t close it off. Open up.
It’s the time of year to embrace the things that are real.
And good.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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