Halls of the Dark Muse

J.D. Salinger seems to be one of those people, where you either love him or hate him. At least I know there are many people who have very strong feelings against The Catcher in the Rye, which I thought was a brilliant book when I read it.

Needless to say I love Salinger, he fascinates me, and perhaps not surprisingly I adore his rather cynical and jaded characters. The emotional coldness that they often have, and their dysfunction in society and relating to other people really speaks to me on a personal level, so Salinger's work always grips me.

I have just finished a collection of his called Nine Stories by J.D Salinger, and while I thoroughly enjoyed them all, the last one in particular just really jumped out at me.

The story is called Teddy, and I found it to be a most fascinating story. It is about a 10 year old boy who is something of a young Brahman, very attuned to Eastern Philosophy, and he has a very deep spiritual understanding of the world, and he believes that he was something of a holy man in a past life, but because of a fall from grace he had to be reborn as an American boy.

So a lot of the ideas reflected within the story spoke to some of my own spiritual beliefs because I am highly influenced in many ways by eastern philosophy and there was this one conversation in particular about death, that I just loved.

"All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody's done it thousands and thousands of times. Just because they don't remember it doesn't mean they haven't done it. It's so silly"

"It is so silly," Teddy said again. "For example, I have a swimming lesson in about five minutes. I could go downstairs to the pool, and there might not be any water in it. This might be the day they change the water or something. What might happen, though, I might walk up to the edge of it, just to have a look at the bottom, for instance, and my sister might come up and sort of push me in. I could fracture my skull and die instantaneously." Teddy looked at Nicholson. "That could happen," he said. "My sister's only six, and she hasn't been a human being for very many lives, and she doesn't like me very much. That could happen, all right. What would be so tragic about it, though? What's there to be afraid of, I mean? I'd just be doing what I was supposed to do, that's all, wouldn't I?"

Nicholson snorted mildly. "It might not be a tragedy from your point of view, but it would certainly be a sad event for your mother and dad," he said. "Ever consider that?"

"Yes of course, I have," Teddy said. "But that's only because they have names and emotions for everything that happens."

"You know Sven" The man who takes care of the gym?" he asked. He waited till he got a nod from Nicholson. "Well, if Sven dreamed tonight that his dog died, he'd have a very, very bad night's sleep, because he's very fond of that dog. But when he woke up in the morning, everything would be all right. He'd know it was only a dream."

Nicholson nodded. "What's the point, exactly?"

The point is if his dog really died, it would be exactly the same thing. Only, he wouldn't know it. I mean he wouldn't wake up till he died himself."

The end of the story is also quite brilliant. It just drops you off of a cliff and leaves you suspended, left to figure out for yourself, what really happens, to which of course there can never really be an answer, which reflects the message that Teddy was trying to convey throughout the story in his ideas on the way in which people are trained to see things, opposed to the way things really are.