Thursday, January 28, 2010

Going through the Rye without being Phony

You guys must have heard the news. Too sad. He wrote a book that never made me want to grow up. One of the few books where a few lined haunted me in my past corporate crisis.Those lines were


The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause while the mark of the mature man is that wants to live humbly for one

More than a few folks got influenced by the book so will leave that alone for a while and give some snapshots as a homage

I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?'' he reasons. "The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question.

You ought to go to a boy's school sometimes. Try it sometime," I said. "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together.


And finally I hope he rests in peace at a world like the following

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'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.

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