Seymour An Introduction

I'm a fraud, I guess.  I hadn't even read Catcher in the Rye until after Salinger died.  Since, though, I've been reading as much as I can and I'm glad to have found it all now.

I won't say that Salinger is my favorite author.  I won't gush over his genius.  Any of my own words would be pathetic.  I will merely repeat some of his own passages from Seymour An Introduction and hopefully let his words reflect on me, the reader, for merely repeating them.

"...As though it were a trifle high. Oh, marvelous thought! Let him come out of this a trifle high. But what kind of high? High, i think, like someone you love coming up on the porch, grinning, grinning, after three hard sets of tennis, victorious tennis, to ask you if you saw that last shot he made. Yes. Oui."

"For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world - not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things - work out rather beautifully."

 Even the passages I chose fall short.  What I'd like to do, really, is invite you over to sit on my porch under twilight and allow me to read the whole book to you.  And when I'm finished, to read you another.

Photo via Ilsa Brink