John Updike

So last week I went off about writers and others who stretch, bend, or otherwise warp their personal histories and work to chase success. A couple days later John Updike died, maybe the 180 degree opposite of that ethos.

Some things, quotes and comments, written about him in his obituary or appreciations -- Updike on his protagonists, "(they) oscillate in their moods between an enjoyment of the comforts of domesticity and the familial life, and a sense that their essential identity is a solitary one -- to be found in flight and loneliness and even adversity. This seems to be my feeling of what being a male human being involves."

Updike in a mid-60's interview: "I like middles. It is in the middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity relentlessly rules." Those last four words .

On his protagonist, Bech knowing he is "a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust." And out of that terrible knowledge comes, I figure, the search for God and, therefore, a way to survive that moment when one begins devolving back to that fleck. The AMNH experience has made being a fleck easier to accept somehow.

Phillip Roth on Updike, "John Updike is our time's greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be ...a national treasure..."

Updike on the great pleasure of being able to write for a living, "To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible...still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act... To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another."

Updike talking to the New Yorker after 9/11 of his conviction that America and its core values would prevail, that "with all its failings, this is a country worth fighting for. Risk is a price of freedom,...mankind's elixir, even if a few turn it to poison." And then that fleck spoke of the towers collapsing and the universe, "(the collapse of the Twin Towers) took your breath away, and shattered your sense of a kindly universe, at least for a while...(but) I tend to give the universe the benefit of the doubt, since it's the only one we have." (Well, of course, that last is questioned by some cosmologists.)

Forty-five years before 9/11, Updike took a walk in my other great post-work enthusiasm of , Central Park: "On the afternoon of the first day of spring, when the gutters were still heaped high with Monday's snow but the sky itself was swept clean, we put on our galoshes and walked up the sunny side of Fifth Avenue to Central Park." He then chronicles what he sees there, ending thus,

"Two pigeons feeding each other.
"Two showgirls, whose faces had not yet thawed the frost of their makeup, treading indignantly through the slush.
"A plump old man saying 'chick, chick' and feeding peanuts to squirrels.
"Many solitary men throwing snowballs at tree trunks.
"Many birds calling to each other about how little the Ramble has changed.
"One red mitten lying lost under a poplar tree.
"An airplane, very bright and distant, slowly moving through the branches of a sycamore."

A great omnivorous voice.