A cult classic, great for Sunday reading.
J.D Salinger perfectly depicts teenage, existential angst in this book.
For whatever reason, I always related to Holden Caulfield’s character and
this is one of my favourite pages from the book. I love how it evokes
such strong feelings of nostalgia :
“She was having a helluva time tightening her Skate.
She didn’t have any gloves on or anything and her
hands were all red and cold. I gave her a hand with
it. Boy, I hadn’t had a skate key in my hand for years.
It didn’t feel funny, though. You could put a skate key
in my hand fifty years from now, in pitch dark, and
I’d still know what is was. She thanked me and all
when I had tightened it for her. She was a very nice,
polite little kid. God, I love it when a kid’s nice and
polite when you tighten their skate for them or some-
thing. Most kids are. They really are. I asked her if
she’d care to have a hot chocolate or something with
me, but she said no, thank you. She said she had to
meet her friend. Kids always have to meet their friend.
That kills me.
Even though it was a Sunday and Phoebe wouldn’t be
there with her class or anything, and even though it
was so damp and lousy out, I walked all the way
through the park over to the Museum of Natural
History. I knew that was the museum the kid with
the skate key meant. I knew that whole museum rou-
tine like a book. Phoebe went to the same school I
went to when I was a kid, and we used to go there all
the time. We had this teacher, Miss Aigletinger, that
took us there damn near every Saturday. Sometimes
we looked at the animals and sometimes we looked at
the stuff the Indians had made in ancient times. Pot-
tery and straw baskets and all stuff like that. I get very
happy when I think about it. Even now. I remember
after we looked at all the Indian stuff, usually we went
to see some movie in this big auditorium. Columbus.
They were always showing Columbus discovering
America, having one helluva time getting old Ferdi-
nand and Isabella to lend him dough to buy ships
with, and then the sailors mutinying on him and all.
Nobody gave too much of a damn about old Columbus,
but you always had a lot of candy and gum and stuff
with you, and the inside of that auditorium had such
a nice smell. It always smelled like it was raining out-
side, even if it wasn’t , and you were in the only nice,
dry, cosy place in the world. I loved that damn
museum.”
