J.D. Salinger Dies at Age 91

My soul trembled awake. I'd read classics before, but I'd never read one that suggested the word classic is hollow, easily crushed, disposable as aluminum, and phony.

The cover of my copy wasn't as welcoming as a carousel; it was white with the title and author's name set in black, bold type. Bands of colored ribbon, like a formal rainbow, stretched across the top left corner. In truth, the cover was plain; akin to a black and white rerun in a world of Technicolor. Still, the title resonated, almost whispered, even appeared to budge, and that's what The Catcher in the Rye did--it budged me into a world of symbols; after all, its author once said of himself, "I am in this world but not of it."

The Catcher in the Rye performed the act of a ferryman in Greek mythology, taking young readers across a river, from what they knew into a world of what they would come to know, and the name given to the boat that would take all of us on this journey jumped out Mrs. Gordon's throat, like a frog from Calaveras County, when she told my tenth grade English class we would spend the next three weeks reading this book with the cover like white snow; and after every statement of conviction she made about the book she nodded her head with the repetitive assurance of Heaven and all its angels. We were not only about to be enlightened, but we knew we were about to be enlightened. Before we even opened the book, we expected, based on the connotations surrounding the its title, to be taken into another realm of thought, and the book delivered on all of this hype and anticipation. Of course, in delivering on this anticipation, this book and the books it led one to read slowly eroded what was left of one's innocence, and maybe that's one reason its author locked himself away from the world--his book was made to do the one act his famous protagonist despised the most. His book became the doorway through which one walked to become an adult reader.

Mrs. Gordon could have used a hundred other books to shove us off that cliff, but she didn't. To make us learn the lessons of Daedalus and Icarus, she chose The Catcher in the Rye, a book written by a man who shared so much with so little, was born on January 1, 1919, and died on January 27, 2010.