transitions and salinger

things are definitely moving! i am currently in chicago, saying some final goodbyes and getting my visa. i am hoping to fly out next week, sometime around the 13th of april. things have been (and continue to be) pretty random, unplanned, and sporadic, but so is life, right? i had a friend ask the other day about my being relatively calm and seemingly relaxed about everything, especially as i was waiting for some paperwork from japan to come. my answer? salinger. i find a lot of peace from franny and zooey, but i've been re-reading 'seymour--an introduction' the last couple days, and it's been great, as always. so, here are some excerpts below. i was going to give some context for each quote, but i think i prefer not to. you should read it. overall, the (fictional) author, buddy glass, is writing an essay about his older brother, seymour, who committed suicide at age 31. i hope you enjoy.

"However contradictory the coroner's report--whether he pronounces Consumption, Loneliness, or Suicide to be the cause of death--isn't it plain to see how the true artist-seer dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience."

"Surely he was all REAL things to us: our blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable conscience, our supercargo, and our one full poet, and, inevitably,...i think, he was also our rather notorious 'mystic' and 'unbalanced type.'"

"...there is evidently one rather terrible hallmark common to all persons who look for God, and apparently with enormous success, in the queerest imaginable places--e.g., in radio announcers, in newspapers, in taxicabs with crooked meters, literally everywhere. (My brother, for the record, had a distracting habit, most of his adult life, of investigating loaded ashtrays with his index finger, clearing all the cigarette ends to the sides--smiling from ear to ear as he did it--as if he expected to see Christ himself curled up cherubically in the middle, and he never looked disappointed.)... The hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile."

"No, no, I can't stop now. It seems to me, in my Condition, that I'm no longer merely asserting my brother's position as a poet; I feel I'm removing, at least for a minute or two, all the detonators from all the bombs in this bloody world--a very tiny, purely temporary public courtesy, no doubt, but mine own."

"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."

"Were most of your stars out?"

"They may shine with the misinformation of the ages, but they shine."

"all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next."