"It loved to happen." -Marcus Aurelius

I re-read Catcher In The Rye a few months ago. I loved it even more the second time. So I decided to read some more by J.D. Salinger. Other than Catcher In The Rye, he really only wrote short stories that were usually published in the New Yorker back in the old days. (I think the fifties) His stories are often about the Glass family, which is a fictional family he created. They are unique in that all seven of the kids were child geniuses (or at least very precocious), though his stories deal with them as adults and how they cope in the world and deal with their pasts. I started by reading "9 stories," which believe it or not is just nine short stories. At least three of them that I can think of deal directly with the Glass family. (though I didn't quite realize it at the time) I loved the short stories, they were perfection. I still find myself thinking about them quite often.

Next I read Franny and Zooey, which is about the two youngest Glass children, who at the time of the book are 20 and 25 respectively. The Glass kids, along with Salinger, have very interesting religious beliefs. In Franny and Zooey, Zooey talks about how when he and Franny were just kids, their oldest brothers, Seymour and Buddy, imposed their college-age infatuation with Eastern mysticism and gave them impossibly high standards, turning them into misanthropic "freaks." At one point they are talking about why everything is so phony and nothing is good enough, and Zooey says: "It's us," Zooey repeated, overriding her. "We're freaks, that's all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that's all. We're the Tattooed Lady, and we're never going to have a minute's peace, the rest of our lives, till everybody else is tattooed, too." Anyway, he is coming to terms with it while his sister Franny's complaints about how her professors, and every college student Harvard wannabe, and really the whole institution of higher learning is just so fake an unsubstantial, and she can't stand it. While Zooey knows where she's coming from, this kind of thought process worries him. Also she read this book that once belonged to their older (deceased) brother Seymour, about the Jesus Prayer. The idea of the Jesus Prayer is a simple prayer that you are to pray constantly in order to fulfill the command of the Bible to "pray without ceasing." And though at first it may be hard, eventually it will bring peace, understanding, oneness with God, etc. The prayer is "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." It is big in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The book she read is about a Pilgrim who set out say the Jesus Prayer constantly, and in the end found enlightenment, basically. Her treatment of everything and her interest in the Jesus Prayer concerns Zooey for several reasons and he ends up confronting Franny. He's not exactly tender with his words either. Though afterwords he pretty much apologizes for scolding her in what I consider to be a really beautiful make up scene and ending to the book. Ahh I just wish you'd read it! Even though I hardly agree with most of the religion points of view in Salinger's books, they still fascinate me. And in this snipped I've chosen for you (Zooey talking to Franny about the Jesus Prayer) I think he says some really interesting things. Worth reading.

As a side note, I think I've discovered something about my reading preferences. I don't care that much about plot. I don't care to read about some guy who has to do something, then there's a plot twist and he has to do something else, and then there's a girl who gets in his way but they end up falling in love and saving the day or the court case or solving the mystery, etc. And even less specific than that, I'm just not all that interested in people doing things. I like books that are about interesting people. Character interaction and development. People who have ideas, whether crazy and off-path, or genius and something I wish I'd thought of. Any unusual, new, different, or somehow refreshing point of view. Don't know if there's a technical name for that kind of preference, but just to warn you, probably most books I recommend are going to have more to do with intriguing characters and their thoughts and interactions than some crazy plot.

I take some of that back. I do enjoy a good Agatha Christie mystery. But that's more for the thinking it involves, AND I love the investigator character, Hercule Paroit, and his wackiness. And I always look forward to his interactions and thoughts, and getting inside his head a little bit. Get the picture?

Okay, on to Zooey, Franny, and the Jesus Prayer. By the way, this might seem a little long. It's just so hard to edit anything out. I wanted to just type the whole last 20 pages. I'm also a little worried that this snippet will misrepresent the content of the book. Just know the whole thing is not only about religion. (though it does play a big part) I just wanted to share the religion portion because I feel like I, and some of my readers, may be interested in it. And I found it quite enjoyable and refreshing to read Zooey bemoaning the training and teaching that Buddy and Seymour have given him, it's one of the few times Salinger actually speaks against the eastern ideas that he usually advocates.

The book though (to me at least) is much more about family, as dysfunctional as it may be. How smart, bossy, loud, egotistical, elitist members of this family stay family despite all that. And like I said, the ending is really beautiful. I want to describe it all or type it all out, but that would really ruin the book. And I'd much rather you read it on your own! Also if you like short stories, you've got to give Nine Stories a shot.

Ooh. I just found a much more concise summary of the book on Amazon. Thought I'd share for some reason. "The stories, originally published in The New Yorker magazine, concern Franny and Zooey Glass, two members of the family that was the subject of most of Salinger's short fiction. Franny is an intellectually precocious late adolescent who tries to attain spiritual purification by obsessively reiterating the "Jesus prayer" as an antidote to the perceived superficiality and corruptness of life. She subsequently suffers a nervous breakdown. In the second story, her next older brother, Zooey, attempts to heal Franny by pointing out that her constant repetition of the "Jesus prayer" is as self-involved and egotistical as the egotism against which she rails."

Okay sorry I got distracted, here it is:

"No matter what I say, I sound as though I'm undermining your Jesus Prayer. And I'm not, God Damn it. All I am is against why and how and where you're using it. I'd like to be convinced--I'd love to be convinced--that you're not using it as a substitute for doing whatever the hell your duty is in life, or just your daily duty. Worse than that, though, I can't see--I swear to God I can't--how you can pray to a Jesus you don't even understand. And what's really inexcusable, considering that you've been funnel-fed on just about the same amount of religious philosophy that I have--what's really inexcusable is that you don't try to understand him. There'd be some excuse for it if you were either a very simple person, like the pilgrim, or a very goddam desperate person--but you're not simple, buddy, and you're not that damned desperate." Just then, for the first time since he had lain down, Zooey, with his eyes still shut, compressed his lips--very much, as a matter of parenthetical fact, in the habitual style of his mother. "God almighty, Franny," he said. "If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up into one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you'd like him to have been. You don't face any facts. This same damned attitude of not facing facts is what got you into this messy state of mind in the first place, and it can't possibly get you out of it."

Zooey abruptly placed his hands over his now quite damp face, left him there for an instant, then removed them. He refolded them. His voice picked up again, almost perfectly conversational in tone. "The part that stumps me, really stumps me, is that I can't see why anybody--unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim--would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was in the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all! Who isn't he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls--but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don't tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with God, and all that--but that's exactly the point. He head to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God." Zooey clapped his hands together--only once, and not loud, and very probably in spite of himself. His hands were refolded across his chest almost, as it were, before the clap was out. "Oh, my God, what a mind!" he said. "Who else, for example, would have kept his mouth shut when Pilate asked for an explanation? Not Solomon. Don't say Solomon. Solomon would have had a few pithy words for the occasion. I'm not sure Socrates wouldn't have for that matter. Crito, or somebody, would have managed to pull him aside just long enough to get a couple well-chosen words for the record. But most of all, above everything else, who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff. Why don't you think of these things? I mean it, Franny, I'm being serious. When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer--you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission. This was no St. Francis, with enough time to knock out a few canticles, or to preach to the birds, or to do any of the other endearing things so close to Franny Glass's heart. I'm being serious now, God damn it. How can you miss seeing that? If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis's consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he'd've picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master he could have possibly picked. And when you miss seeing that, I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that--and you do--and yet you refuse to see it, then you're misusing the prayer, you're using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers." He suddenly sat up, shot forward, with an almost calisthenic-like swiftness, to look at Franny. His shirt was, in the familiar phrase, wringing wet. "If Jesus had intended the prayer to be used for--"

Zooey broke off.