Subject: Re: Everybody is a Nun
From: Catherine Marie (tangerineness@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jan 23 2000 - 16:56:14 EST
>Have you ever been under a tree after a spring shower and someone, usually
>mischievously, shakes the lower branches and you get a two second shower
>from the rain that had been resting on the leaves?
> Standing here under the bananafish tree your post has shaken a branch or
>two for me.
> It's all too easy to take people and life for granted. People are fragile
>temporary and beautiful when our eyes are open.
> Yes, do read DDSBP again. I didn't get alot from it the first time for
>whatever reason. JDS has painted the story in breathless strokes and it may
>be representative of an experience of direct reality that happened to him
>once. On reading F&Z and SaI I assumed that these works were simply
>influenced by his eastern interests, and this may be so. I am wondering now
>if there was not an experience that JDS had that made him get interested in
>easterd philosophy and religion. Daumier-Smith's seeing the girl in the
>shopcase and then having the sun come up and speed to the bridge of his
>nose
>at 93 million miles a second so that the urinals and bedpans in the shop
>window became a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed, enamel
>flowers, may reflect something very real that happened to JDS.
> Oh well, who knows for sure. Thankyou for your lovely post, I am still a
>trifle damp.
>
> ( Tout le monde est une nonne. )
>
>
>Paul M
Paul,
Having reread DDSBP, I'd like to say thank you for telling me to. There was
so much in that I missed the first time. I remembered it and everything, but
somehow I didn't look at it the way I did the first time around. As far as
whether this happened to Salinger directly, I don't know and I don't really
like discussing that. It seems rather unrelated. It's not, but it's not
something that really seems important to the story. I think the story really
says something wonderful about the things we were talking about earlier.
This man is pretty much an incredibly rude person, who understands the world
only as it relates to him, but when he has that "experience" in front of the
shop, he suddenly sees the world as so much larger. He lets go of the idea
of the nun, he gives her "her freedom to follow her own destiny." Some
people say keep trying, and you can get whatever you want, never give in,
etc., but this story suggests that sometimes what we really need to do is
learn when to stop trying to get something that we don't have any right to,
and that we will probably end up wasting. That instead of trying to get
something, you should try to value what you already have. I think the
important thing is that the person in this story is not Franny or Seymour,
but a man who is simply not a good person for most of the story. He is
ambitious, but at the same time has no real goals, and doesn't really care
about anything. By the end of the story he learns to love people in general
in a way he didn't before, even Bambi Kramer. The point I'm trying to
(rather unsuccessfully) make is that he is real, and that real people can
experience the things that F+Z and SAI talk about. That it's not limited to
a few people who grow up under the conditions the Glass family does. Maybe
that line "Everyone is a nun" simply means that everyone gets close to god
(or God) more than they realize, but that, like nuns, we need to realize
that we can't know god completely, as some people might try to, and see that
we are all students, who can never understand everything, not teachers. I am
being forced off this computer, but hopefully will get a chance to continue
this later.
Catherine
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