Teddy by J.D. Salinger (dialogue only)
Hello, there!
Hello
Mind if I sit down a minute? This anybody’s chair?
Well, these four chairs belong to my family but my parents aren’t up yet.
Not up yet? On a day like this, that’s sacriledge, absolute sacriledge. Oh, God, what a divine day, I’m an absolute pawn when it comes to the weather. As a matter of fact, I’ve been known to take a perfectly normal rain day as a personal insult. So this is absolute manna to me. How are you and the weather? The weather ever bother you out of all sensible proportion?
I don’t take it too personal, if that’s what you mean.
Wonderful. My name, incidentally, is Bob Nicholson, I don’t know if we quite got around to that in the gym. I know your name, of course. I was watching you write – from way up there. Good Lord. You were working away like a little Trojan.
I was writing something in my notebook.
How was Europe? Did you enjoy it?
Yes, very much, thank you.
Where all did you go?
Well, it would take me too much time to name all the places, because we took our car and drove fairly great distances. My mother and I were mostly in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Oxford, England, though. I think I told you in the gym I had to be interviewed at both those places. Mostly the University of Edingburgh.
No, I don’t believe you did, I was wondering if you’d done anything like that. How’d it go? They grill you?
I beg your pardon?
How’d it go? Was it interesting?
At times, yes. At times, no. We stayed a little bit too long. My father wanted to get back to New York a little sooner than this ship. But some people were coming over from Stockholm, Sweden, and Innsbruck, Austria, to meet me, and we had to wait around.
It’s always the way.
Are you a poet?
A poet? Lord, no. Alas, no. Why do you ask?
I don’t know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
I rather thought that was their stock in trade. Aren’t emotions what poets are primarily concerned with? I understand you left a pretty disturbed bunch---
Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die. Along this road goes no one, this autumn eve.
What was that? Say that again.
Those are two Japanese poems. They’re not full of a lot of emotional stuff. I still have some water in my ear from swimming yesterday.
I understand you left a pretty disturbed bunch of pedants up at Boston. After that last little set-to. The whole Leidekker examinging group, more or less, the way I understand it. I believe I told you I had rather a long chat with Al Babcock last June. Same night, as a matter of fact, I heard your tape played off.
Yes, you did. You told me.
I understand they were a pretty disturbed bunch. From what Al told me, you all had quite a little lethal bull session late one night—the same night you made that tape, I believe. From what I gather, you made some little predictions that disturbed the boys no end. Is that right?
I wish I knew why people think it’s so important to be emotional. My mother and father don’t think a person’s human unless he thinks a lot of things are very sad or very annoying or very—very unJUST, sort of. My father gets very emotional even when he reads the newspaper. He thinks I’m inhuman.
I take it you have no emotions?
If I do, I don’t remember when I ever used them. I don’t see what they’re good for.
You love God, don’t you? Isn’t that your forte, so to speak? From what I heard on that tape and from what Al Babcock---
Yes, sure, I love Him. But I don’t love Him sentimentally. If I were God, I certainly wouldn’t want people to love me sentimentally. It’s too unreliable.
You love your parents, don’t you?
Yes, I do—very much, but you want to make me use that word to mean what you want it to mean—I can tell.
All right. In what sense do YOU want to use it?
You know what the word “affinity” means?
I have a rough idea.
I have a very strong affinity for them. They’re my parents, I mean, and we’re all part of each other’s harmony and everything. I want them to have a nice time while they’re alive, because they like having a nice time…. But they don’t love me and Booper—that’s my sister—that way. I mean they don’t seem to be able to love us just the way we are. The don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It’s not so good, that way. Do you have the time please? I have a swimming lesson at ten-thirty.
You have time. It’s just ten after ten.
Thank you. We can enjoy our conversation for about ten more minutes.
As I undestand it, you hold pretty firmly to the Vedantic theory of reincarnation.
It isn’t a theory, it’s as much a part—
All right. We won’t argue that point, for the moment. Let me finish. From what I gather, you’ve acquired certain information, through meditation, that’s given you some conviction that in your last incarnation you were a holy man in India, but more or less fell from Grace—
I wasn’t a holy man. I was just a person making very nice spiritual advancement.
All right—whatever it was, but the point is you feel that in your last incarnation you more or less fell from Grace before final Illumination. Is that right, or am I—
That’s right. I met a lady, and I sort of stopped meditation. I would have had to take another body and come back to earth again ANYWAY—I mean I wasn’t so spiritually advanced that I could have died, if I hadn’t met that lady, and then gone straight to Brahma and never again have to come back to earth. But I wouldn’t have had to get incarnated in an AMERICAN body if I hadn’t met that lady. I mean it’s very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you’re a freak if you try to. My father thinks I’m a freak, in a way. And my mother—well, she doesn’t think it’s good for me to think about God all the time. She thinks it’s bad for my health.
I believe you said on that last tape that you were six when you first had a mystical experience. Is that right?
I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that. It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that SHE was God and the MILK was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean. But I could get out of the finite dimensions fairly often when I was four. Not continuously or anything, but fairly often.
You did? You could?
Yes. That was on the tape…. Or maybe it was on the one I made last April. I’m not sure.
How does one get out of the finite dimensions? I mean, to begin very basically, a block of wood is a block of wood, for example. It has length, width—
It hasn’t. That’s where your wrong. Everybody just THINKS things keep stopping off somewhere. They don’t. That’s what I was trying to tell Professor Peet. The reason things SEEM to stop off somewhere is becaue that’s the only way most people know how to look at things, but that doesn’t mean they do. Would you hold up your arm a second please?
My arm? Why?
Just do it. Just do it a second.
This one?
What do you call that?
What do you mean? It’s my arm. It’s an arm.
How do you know it is? You know it’s called an arm, but how do you know it is one? Do you have any proof it’s an arm?
I think that smacks of the worst kind of sophistry, frankly. It’s an arm, for heaven’s sake, because it’s an arm. In the first place, it has to have a name to distinguish it from other objects. I mean you can’t simplify--?
You’re just being logical.
I’m just being what?
Logical. You’re giving me a regular, intelligent answer. I was trying to help you. You asked me how I get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don’t use logic when I do it. Logic’s the first thing you have to get rid of.
You know Adam?
Do I know who?
Adam. In the Bible.
Not personally.
Don’t be angry with me. You asked me a question, and I’m---
I’m not ANGRY with you, for heaven’s sake.
Okay. You know that red apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible? You know what was in that apple? Logic. Logic and intellectual stuff. That was all what was in it. So—this is my point—what you have to do is vomit it up if you want to see things as they really are. I mean if you vomit it up, then you won’t have any more trouble with blocks of wood and stuff. And you’ll know what your arm really is, if you’re interested. Do you know what I mean? Do you follow me?
I follow you.
The trouble is, most people don’t want to see things the way they are. They just want new bodies all the time, instead of stopping and staying with God, where it’s really nice. I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters.
If you’d rather not discuss this, you don’t have to. But is it true, or isn’t it, that you informed the whole Leidekker examining bunch—Walton, Peet, Larsen, Samuels, and that bunch—when and where and how they would eventually die? Is that true, or isn’t it? You don’t have to discuss it if you don’t want to, but the way the rumor around Boston—
No, it’s not true. I told them places, and TIMES, when they should be very careful. And I told them certain things it might be a good idea for them to DO… But I didn’t say anything like THAT. I didn’t say anything was inevitable, that way. And I didn’t tell Professor Peet anything like that at all. Firstly, he wasn’t one of the ones who were kidding around and asking me a bunch of questions. I mean all I told Professor Peet was that he shouldn’t be a teacher any more after January—that’s all I told him. All those other professors, they practically forced me to tell them all that stuff. It was after we were all finished with the interview and making that tape, and it was quite late, and they all kept sitting around smoking cigarettes and getting very kittenish.
But you didn’t tell Wilson, or Larsen, for example, when or where or how death would eventually come?
NO, I did not. I wouldn’t have told them ANY of that stuff, but they kept TALKING about it. Professor Walton sort of started it. He said he really wished he knew when he was going to die, because then he’d know what work he should do and what work he shouldn’t do, and how to use his time to his best advantage, and all like that. And then they all said that ….. so I told them a little bit. I didn’t tell them when they were actually going to die, though. That’s a very false rumor. I COULD have, but I knew that in their hearts they really didn’t want to know. It’s so silly. All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody’s done it thousands and thousands of times. Just because they don’t remember it doesn’t mean they haven’t done it. It’s so silly.
That may be. That may be. But the logical fact remains that no matter how intelligently—
It’s so silly. For example, I have a swimming lesson in about five minutes. I could go downstairs to the pool, and there might not be any water in it. This might be the day they change the water or something. What might happen, though, I might walk up to the edge of it, just to have a look at the bottom, for instance, and my sister might come up and sort of push me in. I could fracture my skull and die instantaneously. That could happen. My sister’s only six and she hasn’t been a human being for very many lives, and she doesn’t like me very much. That could happen, right. What would be so tragic about it, though? What’s there to be afraid of, I mean? I’d just be doing what I was supposed to do, that’s all, wouldn’t I?
It might not be a tragedy from your point of view, but it would certainly be a sad event for your mother and dad. Ever consider that?
Yes, of course, I have. But that’s only because they have names and emotions for everything that happens. You know Sven? The man that takes care of the gym? Well, if Sven dreamed tonight that his dog died, he’d have a very, very bad night’s sleep, because he’s very fond of that dog. But when he woke up in the morning, everything would be all right. He’d know it was only a dream.
What’s the point, exactly?
The point is that if his dog really died, it would be exactly the same thing. Only, he wouldn’t know it. I mean he wouldn’t wake up until he died himself.
I really have to go now I’m afraid. I have one and a half minutes, I guess, to get to my swimming lesson. It’s all the way down on E deck.
May I ask why you told Professor Peet he should stop teaching after the first of the year? I know Bob Peet. That’s why I ask.
Only because he’s quite spiritual, and he’s teaching a lot of stuff right now that isn’t very good for him if he wants to make any real spiritual advancement. It stimulates him too much. It’s time for him to take everything OUT of his head, instead of putting more stuff IN. He could get rid of a lot of the apple in just this one life if he wanted to. He’s very good at meditating. I better go now. I don’t want to be too late.
What would you do if you could change the educational system? Ever think about that at all?
I really have to go.
Just answer that one question, Education’s my baby, actually—that’s what I teach. That’s why I ask.
Well … I’m not too sure what I’d do. I know I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t start with the things schools usually start with. I think I’d first just assemble all the children together and show them how to meditate. I’d try to show them how to find out who they ARE, not just what their names are and things like that … I guess, even before that, I’d get them to empty out everything their parents and everybody ever told them. I mean even if their parents just told them an elephant’s big, I’d make them empty THAT out. An elephant’s only big when it’s next to something else—a dog or a lady, for example. I wouldn’t even tell them an elephant has a trunk. I might SHOW them an elephant, if I had one handy, but I’d let them just walk up to the elephant not knowing anything more about it than the elephant knew about THEM. The same thing with grass, and other things. I wouldn’t even tell them grass is green. Colors are only names. I mean if you tell them the grass is green, it makes them start expecting the grass to look a certain way—YOUR way—instead of some other way that may be just as good, and maybe much better …. I don’t know, I’d just make them vomit up every bit of the apple their parents and everybody made them take a bite out of.
