“There’s no risk you’d be raising a little generation of ignoramuses?”
“Why? They wouldn’t any more be ignoramuses than an elephant is. Or a bird is. Or a tree is,” Teddy said. “Just because something is a certain way, instead of just behaves a certain way, doesn’t mean it’s an ignoramus.”
“No?”
“No!” Teddy said. “Besides, if they wanted to learn all that other stuff—names and colors and things—they could do it, if they felt like it, later on when they were older. But I’d want them to begin with all the real ways of looking at things, not just the way all the other apple-eaters look at things—that’s what I mean.” He came closer to Nicholson, and extended his hand down to him. “I have to go now. Honestly. I’ve enjoyed—”
“Just one second—sit down a minute,” Nicholson said. “Ever think you might like to do something in research when you grow up? Medical research, or something of that kind? It seems to me, with your mind, you might eventually—”
Teddy answered, but without sitting down. “I thought about that once, a couple of years ago,” he said. “I’ve talked to quite a few doctors.” He shook his head. “That wouldn’t interest me very much. Doctors stay too right on the surface. They’re always talking about cells and things.”
“Oh? You don’t attach any importance to cell structure?”
“Yes, sure, I do. But doctors talk about cells as if they had such unlimited importance all by themselves. As if they didn’t really belong to the person that has them.” Teddy brushed back his hair from his forehead with one hand. “I grew my own body,” he said. “Nobody else did it for me. So if I grew it, I must have known how to grow it. Unconsciously, at least. I may have lost the conscious knowledge of how to grow it sometime in the last few hundred thousand years, but the knowledge is still there, because—obviously—I’ve used it. . . . It would take quite a lot of meditation and emptying out to get the whole thing back—I mean the conscious knowledge—but you could do it if you wanted to. If you opened up wide enough.” He suddenly reached down and picked up Nicholson’s right hand from the armrest. He shook it just once, cordially, and said, “Goodbye. I have to go.” And this time, Nicholson wasn’t able to detain him, he started so quickly to make his way through the aisle.
Nicholson sat motionless for some few minutes after he left, his hands on the armrests of the chair, his unlighted cigarette still between the fingers of his left hand. Finally, he raised his right hand and used it as if to check whether his collar was still open. Then he lit his cigarette, and sat quite still again.
He smoked the cigarette down to its end, then abruptly let one foot over the side of the chair, stepped on the cigarette, got to his feet, and made his way, rather quickly, out of the aisle.
Using the forwardship stairway, he descended fairly briskly to the Promenade Deck. Without stopping there, he continued on down, still quite rapidly, to Main Deck. Then to A Deck. Then to B Deck. Then to C Deck. Then to D Deck.
At D Deck the forwardship stairway ended, and Nicholson stood for a moment, apparently at some loss for direction. However, he spotted someone who looked able to guide him. Halfway down the passageway, a stewardess was sitting on a chair outside a galleyway, reading a magazine and smoking a cigarette. Nicholson went down to her, consulted her briefly, thanked her, then took a few additional steps forwardship and opened a heavy metal door that read: to the pool. It opened onto a narrow, uncarpeted staircase.
He was little more than halfway down the staircase when he heard an all-piercing, sustained scream—clearly coming from a small, female child. It was highly acoustical, as though it were reverberating within four tiled walls.
The Catcher
in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
“In Mr. Salinger we have a fresh voice. One can actually hear it speaking, and what it has to say is uncannily true, perceptive, and compassionate.”
clifton fadiman
Book of the Month Club News
“A brilliant, funny, meaningful novel.”
s. n. berhman
The New Yorker
“Mr. Salinger has an unusual talent, to put it quite inadequately, and The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most unusual novels in a long time.”
lewis vogler
San Francisco Chronicle
“It is safe to assume that this year will produce no book quite as explosive.”
david appel
Philadelphia Inquirer
“For U.S. readers, the prize catch in The Catcher in the Rye may well be Novelist Salinger himself. He can understand an adolescent mind without displaying one.”
Time
“Probably the most distinguished first novel, the most truly new novel in style and accent, of the year.”
charles poore
Harper's Magazine
For Esmé, With Love and Squalor Page 18
