I began re-reading some J.D. Salinger the last couple of days, as always, it stirs me in the same deep way it stirs so many people, it is the sacred text of the alienated dreamers and outcasts. It is one of those books that either blows your mind or sails right by it. It is widely considered one of the three great American novels of the 20th century, and sells a quarter-of-a-million copies  a year in paperback more than 60 years after it was published.

When I first read it, I thought Salinger had entered my head and stolen my thoughts, he captured the very voice of my alienation and that of so many other people. Holden Caulfield is one of the distinctive voices and characters in all of literature.

But Salinger had many messages beyond adolescent angst, if you read his work.

One that struck me very deeply was in “De-Damuier-Smith’s Blue Period,” a short story published by Salinger in a British literary journal in 1952. I think all of Salinger’s stories were really about loss and the trauma of isolation, about life’s choices.

The narrator of this story is a teacher at a correspondence-based art school. He only has one talented pupil, and she was the only truly gifted pupil he had ever had. He knew she might be the last.  She was uncertain about pursuing a life as an artist, her parents were discouraging her, they warned her that her life would be uncertain and difficult. Her fear was holding her back.

The teacher wrote her a heartfelt, even brave,  letter, he urged her to invest in good oils and brushes, to commit to the life of the artist. “The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.”

The best it could do, he might have added but did not, is that it would give her joy and satisfaction and meaning beyond the reach or imaginations of most of the people who walk the earth. I know a young artist – he is a teenager – whose art teachers believe he has great gifts and who hope he commits to the life of the artist but they dare not tell him so. In our time, that would be considered inappropriate, and his parents would be furious. The teacher knows his parents want a different kind of life for their son, they want him to study economics or law, so that he can be secure, pay his bills, buy health insurance retire with security.

That is the panoply of contemporary American rationales for life: do work you do not love for people who care nothing about you  so that you can buy things you don’t need or really want and live beyond your time so that you cannot do what you love or wish to do. In another time, this was called slavery, and one day it might be called that again. Some of the Amazon warehouse workers and fast food franchise employees are using the term.

I wish this young artist would read Catcher In The Rye.  Holden Caulfield struggled to find his way in an alien world and could not find it by himself. Salinger was not saying that one must  commit to the life of the artist or writer to be happy – or even slightly unhappy much of the time. I believe he understood the importance of committing to one’s life in whatever way lifts the heart and shines up the soul, whatever the work. It was a theme that cropped up often in his work, it was what he did in his own life.

The thing is, there are always so many reasons in our culture not to commit to your life, so few people encouraging you to try. Several years ago, a college student came to me, he wanted desperately to be a writer, his father wanted him to go to law school just as desperately and be safe and secure by his lights. His father demanded that he take a day job while he worked on his first novel so that he would have something to ball back on in the likely event that he failed as a writer. After all, many people do.

I do not generally give advice to people, but this young man was a very gifted writer, his work was striking, I had dinner with him in a restaurant in Saratoga Springs, and I said this to him: ‘I hope you do not take a day job because if you do, you will never commit to being a writer, it will be so easy to flee or quit. Life is short, I said, and if you have to fail at something, it might as well be something you love.”

This week, celebrating our fourth wedding anniversary, I told Maria late at night that my marriage to her made me understand that I was not living in my life for most of it, I had not committed to my life until we met and we helped one understand that this commitment to our creativity was the point and purpose of our lives.

I stopped moving, fighting, struggling in panic, deteriorating,  and committed myself to my life, where I am slightly unhappy some of the time, joyously happy much of the time, in between the rest of the time. For me, being committed to my life means finding live, doing work that I love,  it means encouraging others, sacrificing security and some comfort. It means being slightly fearful much of the time, terrified much of the time, peaceful and fulfilled most of the time.

There is a cocoon of fear around most of us, it is parroted  by our leaders,  our bankers, our doctors and lawyers, our journalists, websites and news alerts.

These voices of fear tell us we can no longer commit to the life we want, as Henry David Thoreau did. He would not last a week at Walden Pond in the age of Facebook. We are taught to be committed only to the life their system tells us we must want an have in order to be secure and pay for lives that are too often without meaning or joy. The mother of my young artist friend keeps telling him to focus on other studies, he must have a “real job”, a “real” life to protect him from the life of the artist, from his purpose and destiny. She is stealing his soul right out from under him.

Like the teacher, I wish I could transform myself into one of those cherubs that dance throughout the Kabbalah and come into this young man’s room in the middle of the night, and kiss him on the cheeks and put him in a trance, and whisper: “Do not let anyone ever tell you how to life your life. Follow your heart to the ends of the earth. Commit to the life of the artist and know the inexpressible joy and meaning that comes from committing yourself to your life.”

And so, in my imagination,  he did.