visualizing the future

"Esmé was standing with crossed ankles again. "You´re quite sure you won´t forget to write that story for me?" she asked. "It doesn´t have to be exclusively for me. It can -"
I said there was absolutely no chance that I´d forget. I told her that I´d neve written a story for anybody, but that it seemed like exactly the right time to get down to it.
She nodded. "Make it extremely squalid and moving", she suggested. "Are you acquainted with squalor?"
I said not exactly but I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time, and that I´d do my best to come up to her specifications. We shook hands.
"Isn´t it a pity that we didn´t meet under less extenuating circumstances?"
I said it was, I said it certainly was.
"Goodbye," Esmé said. "I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact."
I thanked her, and said a few other words, and then watched her leave the room. She left slowly, reflectively, testing the ends of her hair for dryness.

For Esmé with love and squalor - J.D.Salinger

a striking realization

"In the nine o'clock twilight, as I approached the school building from across the street, there was a light on in the orthopedic appliances shop. I was startled to see a live person in the shopcase, a hefty girl of about thirty, in a green, yellow and lavender chiffon dress. She was changing the truss on the wooden dummy. As I came up to the show window, she had evidently just taken off the old truss; it was under her left arm (her right "profile" was toward me), and she was lacing up the new one on the dummy. I stood watching her, fascinated, till suddenly she sensed, then saw, that she was being watched. I quickly smiled--to show her that this was a no hostile figure in the tuxedo in the twilight on the other side of the glass--but it did no good. The girl's confusion was out of all normal proportion. She blushed, she dropped the removed truss, she stepped back on a stack of irrigation basins--and her feet went out from under her. I reached out to her instantly, hitting the tips of my fingers on the glass. She landed heavily on her bottom, like a skater. She immediately got to her feet without looking at me. Her face still flushed, she pushed her hair back with one hand, and resumed lacing up the truss on the dummy. It was just then that I had my Experience. Suddenly (and I say this, I believe, with all due self-consciousness), the sun came up and sped toward the bridge of my nose at the rate of ninety-three million miles a second. Blinded and very frightened--I had to put my hand on the glass to keep my balance. The thing lasted for no more than a few seconds. When I got my sight back, the girl had gone from the window, leaving behind her a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed, enamel flowers."

De Daumier-Smith´s Blue Period - J.D. Salinger

to hold or not to hold

"I don´t want you to get the idea she was a goddam icicle or something, just we never necked or horsed around much. She wasn´t. I held hands with her all the time, for instance. That doesn´t sound like much, I realize, but she was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hands dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they´d bore you or  something. Jane was different. We´d get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we´d start holding hands, and we wouldn´t quit till the movie was over.  And without changing the position or making a big deal out of it.  You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were."

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D.Salinger

unclaimed

"X sat looking at the door for a long while, then turned his chair around toward the writing table and picked up his portable typewriter from the floor. He made space for it on the messy table surface, pushing aside the collapsed file of unopened letters and packages. He thought if he wrote  letter to an old friend of his in New York there might be some quick, however slight, therapy in it for him. But he couldn´t insert his notepaper into the roller properly, his fingers were shaking so violently now. He put his hands down at sides for a minute, then tried again, but finally crumpled the notepaper in his hand.
He was aware that he ought to get the wastebasket out of the room, but instead of doing anything about it, he put his arms on the typewriter and rested his head again, closing his eyes."

For Esmé , with love and squalor - J.D.Salinger