“She was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hands dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they'd bore you or something. Jane was different. We'd get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we'd start holding hands, and we wouldn't quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.”
—J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the RyeCatcher in the Rye dropped from US school curriculum - Telegraph
telegraph.co.ukSchools in America are to drop classic books such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye from their curriculum in favour of ‘informational texts’.
I find this extremely disturbing and frightening. I know literature is becoming less prominent in favor of the sciences, but I never dreamt I might witness the death of it in my lifetime. Not everyone is scientifically-minded… Without literature, we lose those people’s type of genius, a genius that will not be truly recognized until it is gone. The world is moved by what people write. The ideas captured in these works of art exemplify the minds of an age, of a generation, of a culture. If we lose that, we lose emotion and human nature. Children need to know that they can express themselves, and they need to be taught that they are not alone in their feelings - it is one of the most reassuring feelings in the world when I read something in a book that another human being wrote that I understand on that special emotional level that I cannot get from normal methods of communication. I find pieces of myself in books, and I know that I am not alone. People need that.
Not to mention the historial significance of literature. The feelings of a time are recorded in what their people write. Most things we know about past cultures we found in their writings. Their beliefs, customs and doings are all found in their literature. What will people thousands of years from now find from our civilization?
We cannot lose touch with ourselves. We cannot allow the scientific age to turn us into unfeeling robots only meant to be “workplace ready.” We need to live and feel and express ourselves. The first step to defending that is defending the young people who cannot defend themselves and do not know what they are missing out on. This is unacceptable and needs to be stopped.
“I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Everytime they do something pretty, even if they’re not much to look at, or even if they’re sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.”
—J. D. SalingerCatcher in the Rye
