Leaving aside for the moment any comment on his literary works, I would like to point out one potentially enduring legacy of the writer J.D. Salinger, who died this week. He had the guts to admit that fame is not all it’s cracked up to be.

There is a conspiracy of silence among famous and rich people. They are afraid to say fame and wealth are not all that great. Perhaps they worry that this will reflect poorly on them. After all, why haven’t more famous and rich people spoken up? Maybe there is something wrong with them and so they keep quiet.

As is well known, Salinger retreated from the world of celebrity and refused all interviews for many years. He stopped publishing long ago. He was belligerent about his privacy, perhaps hypocritically, and he may have been a neurotic crank. But that’s beside the point. He was right about fame. It can ruin everything, destroying your privacy and making it impossible to think.

How would I know? Look closely at the lives of the rich and famous. It’s plain as day.

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