the opposite of a true everlasting unimportance

for years and years my dear sister has preached the genius of j.d. salinger. for the most part her adoration was based on holden caulfield, but then it bleed into salinger as a true artist when she became absorbed in franny and zoey.

being one of those truly obnoxious people who tend to hate everything someone swears i will love, i refused to have any part in appreciating this great american genius. but then, the other day my stubbornness met its match when my much stronger daddy's girl persona entered the picture.

for as long as i can remember, my father has kept an influential stack of magazines, that were always addressed to him, in his basement retreat. my father loves magazines, and if you were to go down every morning after he has left for the day, you would know what he left that morning thinking about based on where he left off in the magazine he left open that day. be it new yorker, vogue or vanity fair, there is always a magazine broken open to some intriguing article.

so the other day i padded down to the basement to put in a load of laundry and found an open new yorker. usually i thumb through each weekly intellectual installment for a solid cartoon giggle, but this time my attention got stuck on the article my father had left off on that morning. salinger had died a week or two before, and while a majority of this edition was devoted to his genius, this particular article will remain, i believe till i die, one of the most moving pieces i have ever read.
written by lillian ross, a long time friend of salinger, it talked about the man he was in terms of the writer he saw everyone else to be. as with most things that truly move you, i can't completely explain why i will always hold ross' words so close to my heart, but i feel that it has something to do with the way she contextualizes some of the genius words of salinger. that, and the fact that it felt to me like a pep talk on how to be the writer i set out to be. do it because you have a story to tell, because the happiness to pass onto the keys is greater than what you expect from the life that others might hand you, i heard him tell me. stop looking to be a mouth piece, and focus on being a story teller. that is what i heard her telling me he would say if i were to ask him for any sort of advice on the profession i have chosen.

in the end, it's that personal attention from the writer that keeps people engaged. people will rarely read something that they don't feel speaks to them, so the trick, which ross so fully achieved is reaching that moment when speaking from your heart, about one of your close friends, calls to some great mass who is then touched by your words and changed into something they weren't sure they could become.

lillian ross, you and your good friend j.d. salinger did that for me, and i will be eternally grateful.

photo: lillian ross