עברית The guardian of childhood finds himself in an age in which childhood is created and at the same time also annihilated. He positions himself at the edge of the cliff to stand by the abandoned children running unprotected, infinitely abandoned, to their devastating falling
JD Salinger was one of the rare guardians of the event of our time. His province of guardianship included two connected territories: Childhood and Adolescence. His genius streams forth from the purity of his dedication to this task, by means of which he guarded a specific secret of the threshold of the event.
What are the main duties of this task? The guardian of childhood finds himself in an age in which childhood is created and at the same time also annihilated, by the forces of the self-same civilization. He positions himself, therefore, at the edge of the cliff, on the dangerous tip of the abyss, to stand by the abandoned children running unprotected, infinitely abandoned, into their devastating falling, to be with them as they experience the abyss of childhood's' lose. He knows he cannot really rescue them from our time’s grim fate, because the beast of our civilization demands childhood’s sacrifice to oil the cogs and wheels of its unhuman machinery, in the schools, universities, markets and media. His consciously endured helplessness is what, after all, makes him into this faithful guardian. So, he chooses to position himself right inside this abyss, because he wishes to stand by their side when they must cross, unprotected, unguided, this abyss's threshold for the first time in earthly life. There he becomes a guardian of the rites of passage in-between adolescent and adulthood; he strives faithfully to protect the passage itself in its full reality. And he awaits them also down there, in the bottomless abyss after the fall, knowing full well, without any glint of sentimentality or self-aggrandizement so common in false spirituality, that “Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve”. (as Thornton Wilder so apply observes)
And, of course, he was always ready to "pay the price" in his own life, as the “cultured” philistines would say; But for him the only really tragic price is childhood's lost and puberty's betrayal. And as Nietzsche “paid the price” for his fateful fidelity to the tragic truth of the event of the end of the 19thcentury, so did also JD Salinger in the middle of the 20th century. Both were faithful to their helplessness, which made them the most powerful guardians of the modern event of God’s death.
And above all: we would be able to avoid philistine's judgments concerning the life and destiny of such guardians only if we experience with them also the intense inner joy and bliss that they so often experienced as the guardians of living truth!
In his short obituary Julian Barnes catches a glimpse of this profound mission, when he said that “Salinger wrote one pitch-perfect masterpiece”.
"You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter." The opening line of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is pure ear, pure voice, utter authorial confidence. American novelists have always been better than the British at such instant, easy, colloquial engagement with the reader. The (much quoted, and much longer) first line of The Catcher in the Rye ("If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap") is as seductive as Twain's, and the promise it holds out just as fulfilled. Salinger's death is stirring up the usual biographical detritus of macrobiotic diets and lover's whispered complaints; also the quasi-serious distractions of career trajectory, artistic "development" (or its absence) and the mystery of the unpublished manuscripts. All that matters, at this moment of death, is that Salinger wrote one pitch-perfect masterpiece that will speakingly endure until the contorting condition known as adolescence disappears from our civilisation.