Sing me a song

I recently reread Franny from Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. The first time I read it must have been at least a decade ago. I remember being surprisingly moved by it, but now I'm mostly surprised by how little I actually remembered of it. For example, I didn't remember that Franny went to visit her boyfriend at his college; I thought they were both in New York. I didn't remember that they were eating at a restaurant fancy enough to serve snails and frog legs; I thought they were at a diner. I didn't remember that the occasion for the date was "the Yale game." I didn't remember Franny's love letter, and certainly not the spelling mistakes in them, or that she fainted, or that, as she was lying in the backroom of the restaurant, recovering, the boyfriend basically said to her, "I hope we can still have sex later, it's been so long."

What I do remember was Franny's despair at the smallness and meaninglessness of everything and everyone including, most immediately, the boyfriend she was talking to and the false modesty with which he was telling her about his paper on Flaubert. I also remember being reminded by this scene of my relationship with one of my best friends from boarding school. Unfortunately, the boyfriend reminded me of myself. I had never thought that I could be so male.

Yesterday I wondered where all the people who made Salinger so famous by so closely relating to Franny and Zooey and The Catcher In the Rye were. Then it occurred to me that they're everywhere but closeted. Some part of everyone believes, like Franny or Zooey or Holden Caulfield, that everything is small and meaningless and that everyone is "phony," but it's covered, layer by layer, with the thickening resignation to being phony in order to cope with the mounting evidence that smallness and meaninglessness are inevitable. Those who refuse to cope are either gone from this world or hiding in some dim, dusty corner of it. Even if they found each other, what would there be to communicate but bitter howls and screeches? Better to stay in the world and sing. At least it sounds nice.