I feel a bit like one of the Beatles, starting out this blog post with “I read the news today, oh boy…” but there is really no other way to put it. The news headline read:  “J.D. Salinger passed away.” Okay, yes he was 91 years old and we all like to say, when the aged pass from us, that it was a good, long life. And, we’d all lost the hope long ago of reading just one more line evolved into crystal clarity in his brilliant mind. Like Garbo, Salinger chose seclusion over adulation and, as with Garbo, our eyes lost a perfectly lovely vivid face.

As the story goes, after “The Catcher in the Rye” sold millions, with Salinger’s picture (such an intriguing, seductive face) looking out from each dust jacket, Salinger became “sick of seeing” himself and demanded that his photo be removed from future editions. I guess you could say that the vivid face he left us with, instead, was not his, but that of Holden Caulfield. No doubt, that teen-aged face is etched differently in the mind of each of us, but even through the veil of diverse gray matter, we’d all recognize him still.

It is strange that we feel such a collective loss of someone whose face we haven’t seen in over half a century. But, I suppose it is because we know that along with the loss of his vivid face, we’ve forever lost his vivid mind as well.

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