Valentines Night

As cued by the peering pressure of the social calender, here’s a valentines post:

For the first time in five years I will be spending Valentines night with no specific romantic plans (let’s leave my relationship with my hand out of this, shall we). I will be however reading, watch a film and most likely end up sitting in a dark room listening to Max Richter. My favorite love story is probably “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” from Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger. There’s something rather uncool and cliche about loving Salinger, but seriously, he might be the best writer who ever lived.

Let me be brief, redundant, and pedantic at the same time: “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is about the titular young smug painter who moves to Canada to teach painting with a weird Japanese couple; hilarity ensues. (I’m fucking this up already.) Put short, he is a lonely prick. He falls in love with a student — through paintings she sends in the mail for him to critique — and, in that sacred way, courts her with the untaught heart that makes love unbearable. The student is a nun Smith invisions as a young ripe 18 year old nubile, in denial of the fact that she’s really around 60 yrs old. Upon receiving Smith’s heated letter/booty call, the seminary retracts the nun’s enrollment in the painting program. Smith loses not only his prospects of getting laid, but much more (there’s a lot of Christ symbolic stuff that I won’t get into). Smith dresses up in a tux and gets drunk, to make a memory out of nothing, and through a stunning moment of reflected sunrise light only Salinger could imagine and convey, Smith realizes  that “everyone is a nun,” which, in my mind, means as “god is everywhere.”

Salinger’s god is love. Have a nice Valentine’s day.