Easter thoughts from your friendly neighborhood agnostic.

When I look for examples of of godliness, or godly people, I resort to fictional characters. J.D. Salinger's Seymour is one of these. Salinger kills him in a 1948 short story ("A Perfect Day for a Bananafish"). After a rather caustic portrait of Seymour's wife (and presumably of middle class proto-suburbanites), Salinger--cruelly to my mind--has Seymour shoot himself while his wife naps nearby.

I don't know enough about Salinger, or am not enough of a literary critic, to know whether Salinger regretted offing Seymour, but Salinger couldn't let him go. Seymour would continue to appear in later stories, and in 1959, Salinger wrote a novella called "Seymour: An Introduction," in which Seymour's closest brother, Buddy, writes a preface to a collection of Seymour's haiku. These two passages stand out for me, for Salinger's vivid storytelling and humor, and for how his literary creation inspires me.

So, for this Easter, here's to all those who already have a belief, and to all the rest of us who don't, but muddle along with a faith that we might learn to see God curled up somewhere, that we might get a ride on a Joe Jackson bike, and that we might get better at loving others as well as Seymour loved Les.

. . .there is very evidently one rather terrible hallmark common to all persons who look for God, and apparently with enormous success, in the queerest imaginable places--e.g., in radio announcers, in newspapers, in taxicabs with crooked meters, literally everywhere. (My brother, for the record, had a distracting habit, most of his adult life, of investigating loaded ashtrays with his index finger, clearing all the cigarette ends to the sides--smiling from ear to ear as he did it--as if he expected to see Christ himself curled up cherubically in the middle, and he never looked disappointed.) The hallmark, then of the advanced religious, nonsectarian or any other (and I graciously include in the definition of an "advanced religious," odious though the phrase is, all Christians on the great Vivekananada's terms; i.e., 'See Christ, then you are a Christian; all else is talk')--the hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile.

[Les] came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishing. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation--in my view, at least--was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been neatly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les--as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle. And aside from its enormous sentimental value to my father personally, this answer, in a great many ways, was true, true, true.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (Boston: LB Books, 1963): 108-109 and 148-149.

NOTE: nearly the same version of what I originally wrote for my Facebook Notes, April 24, 2011.