J.D. Salinger slept here

The New York Times had a column today about Ursinus College’s clever use of the fact that author J.D. Salinger spent a semester there in 1938 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/education/21winerip.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&sq=Ursinus&st=cse&scp=1=). The college in Collegeville, PA sponsors a creative writing contest and awards the freshman winner a scholarship and the right to live in J.D. Salinger’s old room for freshman year.

My 17-year-old son Tom—who wants to major in creative writing or journalism-- was accepted to Ursinus. We toured the college in January and hooted when we heard about the contest to award J.D. Salinger’s room.

“They probably haven’t changed the sheets since Salinger slept there,” my law school student son Mike said.

Times columnist Michael Winerip took the notion a step further and asked prior occupants of the J.D. Salinger room which author’s room they would most like to sleep in. They picked Dave Eggers, Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy.

An interesting question. I asked around.
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My 28-year-old son Matt said he’d most like to sleep in Michael Lewis’ room. Michael Lewis is the rogue financial journalist who’s looked at the gambling inherent in various financial markets. He also wrote “The Blind Side,” the story of ghetto kid Michael Oher who was adopted by a wealthy family and became a big football star.

My 24-year-old son Mike said Ernest Hemingway. “Somethings tells me his room would be in a cabin in the woods, or in a room above a bar, or in a hotel in a war-torn city,” Mike wrote.

My high school senior son Tom said Kurt Vonnegut “because there would be some weird s..t in that room.”

My high school sophomore daughter Maeve said the French social commentator Montesquieu or the metaphysical poet John Donne, “because they’re smart.”

I would like to live in poet Emily Dickinson’s room. In some ways, I feel as if I already have.

Dickinson seems to have had agoraphobia. She was reclusive, seldom going out in public through her adult years and keeping up friendships through a torrid correspondence by mail. She got to the point where she would stand in the upstairs hallway and listen to the conversation of guests downstairs in the parlor, but she would not go down and participate in the conversation. There was a lot of scandal and drama in her close-knit family—her brother Austin had a longstanding affair (Emily apparently never met her brother’s mistress), her mother had a paralytic stroke that made Emily and her sister Lavinia caregivers for a number of years. But Emily was not part of the give-and-take of the greater community.

Her home, particularly her room, was her eggshell. All that she needed for sustenance and for creativity was inside. Within her room, she luxuriated in the life and playfulness and intimacy of her own mind.

I have to fight off my own tendency toward agoraphobia. I feel I have pretty much everything I need for a rich and fulfilling life, between my own thoughts, the written words of others, and field reports from my family in their walks of life. Add music and trips outside to see the sky and the moon and the water in the stream rushing over the rocks, and trips to the recycling center to see what other people are casting off. You have a daily kaleidoscope of experience to be grateful for.

Imagine if Emily Dickinson had the Internet, that thing with digital feathers, the richness of so many minds in a virtual reservoir invented by an American vice-president in a time far in the future. She could only hope.