Here's a good quote from the end of Camus' first chapter in The Rebel:
Meanwhile, we can sum up the initial progress that the spirit of rebellion provokes in a mind that is originally imbued with the absurdity and apparent sterility of the world. In absurdist experience, suffering is individual. But from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience. Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe. The malady experienced by a single man becomes a mass plague. In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the "cogito" in the realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence. But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel – therefore we exist.
Agreed – though that part about contemplating humanity's place in the universe also reminds me of an optimistic counter-argument from Split Enz: The tyranny of distance didn't stop the cavalier, so why should it stop me? I'll conquer and stay free!
J.D. Salinger was my introduction to the wonderful world of candor and snarking on phonies. I was probably Holden Caulfield's age when I first read The Catcher in The Rye, the perfect age for identifying with that sort of thing. Like many others, I was tired of all the insincerity I saw around me and skeptical of those who professed to be sincere. At least that's what I got out of the book at the time. Awareness of the book's flaws came after that initial amazement at someone articulating so many truths (or things I deemed true). It's just so frank about so much. Aw, hell. When something helps influence you at a young age, it's hard to look back with a critical eye. I've read and reread Catcher so many times that I have certain lines memorized and they'll run through my head once in a while, like a fragment of a song I can't forget. All these little melodies reappearing out of the blue.
In the 11th grade, near the end of our unit on The Catcher in the Rye, I made a "serious" mix with a tracklisting and description of how each track related to something in the book. My friend H made one as well. Both our mixes had "Rollerskate Skinny" by The Old 97's on it because that was one of the phrases Holden uses to describe his sister. The last track on mine was "Lowdown" by My Morning Jacket because the gentle tune and leisurely drums reminded me of the carousel spinning around and around near the end of the book. A soundtrack for the final scene in the film adaptation in my head. Just one of those earnest things you do as a kid.
There's a line in Catcher about how Holden thinks the best authors are the ones you'd like to hear more from: "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." From what I've read about Salinger in his later years, I probably wouldn't have wanted to know him as he was, but based on what I've read from the man, I'd have liked to call him up. Not Holden, but the guy who wrote Catcher and all those other words that comfort people for some reason or another. Sometimes you'll read something and it's so damn nice that you just want to check out everything else the author's done, because if they've already come up with something that resonates with you, who knows what else they have up their sleeve? Enlighten me, man. Tell me more.
I'd still like to believe that this is all an elaborate hoax by a cantankerous old coot who just wants everyone off his back, but it's drawing far too much attention for someone who made a point of becoming a recluse for the rest of his life.
From Roland Barthes's book about himself, the concisely-titled Roland Barthes:
La cotelette ~ The rib chop
Here is what I did with my body one day:
At Leysin, in 1945, in order to perform an extrapleural pneumothorax operation, a piece of one of my ribs was removed, and subsequently given back to me, quite normally, wrapped up in a piece of medical gauze (the physicians, who were Swiss, as it happened, thereby professed that my body belongs to me, in whatever dismembered state they restored it to me: I am the owner of my bones, in life as in death). For a long time I kept this fragment of myself in a drawer, a kind of body penis analogous to the end of a rib chop, not knowing quite what to do with it, not daring to get rid of it lest I do some harm to my person, though it was utterly useless to me shut up in a desk among such "precious" objects as old keys, a schoolboy report card, my grandmother B.'s mother-of-pearl dance program and pink taffeta card case. And then, one day, realizing that the function of any drawer is to ease, to acclimate the death of objects by causing them to pass through a sort of pious site, a dusty chapel where, in the guise of keeping them alive, we allow them a decent interval of dim agony, but not going so far as to dare cast this bit of myself into the common refuse bin of my building, I flung the rib chop and its gauze from my balcony, as if I were romantically scattering my own ashes, into the rue Servandoni, where some dog would come and sniff them out.
He literally threw it away. Bwa!
And I guess on some other level, I dig the anxiety here, the vague pack-rat habit of keeping all these old bits of yourself. It's one of the things I like about Barthes: his ability to pinpoint little truths about the world that, were it not for his aphoristic articulation, I'd possibly think more dumbly about. For example, just how often do I use the things that I put in drawers? I pretend to store them for future usage, but most of the time I tend to forget about the things I put away.
Does it need to be put into words, this minor revelation? No – and yes. No, to the extent that articulating this little truth about my drawer habits doesn't do anything significant to my life, doesn't change the world or my place in it, that sort of thing. However, on the flip side: Yes, in that the bigger picture of it – Barthes' ideas triggering a change in my perceptions – emphasizes one of the cooler influences of language, its power to create variety through facilitating communication between individuals (en masse, one on one, whatever). Well, that's my novice way of (para)phrasing it…
All that from a fun little anecdote about a bit of bone!
P.S. "This is what I did with my body one day" – ain't he cute?