Well… A substitute teacher out on Lo...

Well…

A substitute teacher out on Long Island was dropped from his job for fighting with a student. A few weeks later, the teacher returned to the classroom, shot the student unsuccessfully, held the class hostage, and then shot himself. Successfully. This fact caught my eye: last sentence. Times. A neighbor described him as a nice boy. Always reading Catcher in the Rye.

The nitwit-- Chapman-- who shot John Lennon said he did it because he wanted to draw the attention of the world to The Catcher in the Rye and the reading of that book would be his defense.

And young Hinckley, the whiz kid who shot Reagan and his press secretary, said if you want my defense all you have to do is read Catcher in the Rye.

[… … …]

Our boy Holden says “What scares me most is the other guy’s face-- it wouldn’t be so bad if you could both be blindfolded-- most of the time the faces we face are not the other guys’ but our own faces. And it’s the worst kind of yellowness to be so scared of yourself you put blindfolds on rather than deal with yourself…”

To face ourselves.

That’s the hard thing

The imagination, That’s God’s gift to make the act of self-examination bearable.

For full extended monologue, please refer to clips or the script edition cited here: Guare, John, Six Degrees of Separation, Vintage Books, 1994, pp 31-34.