Guare's Six Degrees

Paul: [about Catcher in the Rye]: 

I finished the book. It's a touching story, comic because they boy wants to do so much and can't do anything. Hates all phoniness and only lies to others. Wants everyone to like him, is only hateful, and is completely self-invovled. In other words, a pretty accurate picture of a male adolescent. 

And what alarms me about the book-- not the book so much as the aura about it-- is this: The book is primarily about paralysis. They boy can't function. And at the end, before he can run away and start a new life, it starts to rain and he folds. 

Now there's nothing wrong in writing about emotional and intellectual paralysis. It may indeed, thanks to Chekhov and Samuel Beckett, be the great modern theme. 

the extraordinary last lines of WAITING FOR GODOT-- "Let's go," "Yes, let's go." Stage directions: They do not move. 

But the aura around this book of Salinger's-- which perhaps should be ready by everyone BUT young men--is this: It mirrors like a fun house mirror and amplifies like a distorted speaker one of the great tragedies of our times-- the death of the imagination. 

Because what else is paralysis?

the imagination has been so debased that imagination-- being imaginative- rather than being the lynchpin of our existence now stands as a synonym for something outside ourselves like science fiction or some new use for tangerine slices on raw pork chops-- what an imaginative summer recipe-- and STAR WARS! So imaginative! And STAR TREK-- so imaginative! And LORD OF THE RINGS-- all those dwarves- so IMAGINATIVE. the imagination has moved out of the realm of being our link, our more personal link, with our inner lives and the world outside that world-- this world we share. What is schizophrenia but a horrifying state where what's in here doesn't match up with what's out there?

why has imagination become a synonym for style?

I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. 

I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely US. 

Jung says the greatest isn is to be unconscious. 

Our boy Holden says "What scares me the most is the other guy's face--it wouldn't be so bad if you could both be blindfolded--most of the time the faces we face are not eh other guys' by our own faces. And it's the worse kind of yellowness to be scared of yourself you put blindfolds on rather than deal with yourself..."

To face ourselves. 

that's the hard thing. 

the imagination. 

that's God's figt ot make the act of self-examination bearable.