On Not Caring As Much About the Death of JD Salinger as I Feel Like I Should

I heard it today in serious, low tones in the faculty room: “JD Salinger died last night.” Three American Lit teachers sat for a moment of respectful silence, then two began ribbing the other about the poem she should write for Café Mots. An “Ode to Salinger.” I chuckled a “maybe,” and returned to the crossword puzzle with which I had been struggling moments before. I scribbled in the margin, “I heard today that JD died” thinking it had a nice ring to it for a first line. Then—in the pitiful way I construct poetry—I ran through some possible rhyming words that would help me with the next line: “tried,” “cried,” “lied,” “denied.” I considered . . . I spied and tried but could not cried. No. I changed the line. “I heard that JD died today.” No, it’s too confusing. He didn’t die today and that’s what the grammatical structure of that line sounds like. Then, I lost interest and returned to my crossword puzzle.
So, let me just be honest for a minute and admit that despite the hours upon days upon weeks upon years I have spent among the intimate frustrations of Holden Caulfield, I am not particularly grieved by the loss of his creator. Salinger was a mess—either because he could not stand the feedback of his literary critics (wimp), or because he could not tolerate society (weak), or because he was messed up to begin with (whatever), he lived a life of famous reclusiveness and estrangement from his closest family members even. I feel as deeply about his passing as I feel about the latest news from the domestic front of whichever Kardashian just had a baby.
Another revelation occurred to me today, however, in the midst of this indifference. I simple cannot write poetry unless I am at least moderately tortured about something. Having spent as much time as I have reading and discussing The Catcher in the Rye with students (8500 minutes to be as close to exact as I can get—which is a little more than 141 hours—which is almost 6 straight days), one might think I could write an ode to someone whose portrayal of teen angst has filled so much of my time for the last seven years. But I just don’t care.
Were Holden Caulfield to pass away, now, that might be another story—I might one day be able to write an “Ode to Holden.” And this is what is fascinating about the phenomena of canonized literature. I know and care ten thousand times more about a fictional protagonist than I ever could about his flesh-and-blood creator. The former is, however, immortalized in language arts classrooms around the world. We will never hold a funeral for Holden Caulfield, or mourn his loss, or sing belated encomiums of his troubled, but brutally honest musings—because it will never be necessary to do so.
Thus I will conclude, in all due respect: the passing of JD Salinger elicits from me merely this: “Sleep tight, ya moron!”