HEINRICH HEINE'S "TRAVEL PICTURES" | More Intelligent Life
- "[Childhood] is so unlike adulthood, when we become more intentional, dwelling on the particular, having cashed in the clear gold of contemplation for the paper money of dictionary definitions, gaining in life experience what we lose in the deep lustre of looking."
LAST THOUGHTS ON JOHN UPDIKE | More Intelligent Life
John Updike shaped the minutia of life into some kind of grand narrative. Arcing baseballs and neon signs for cooking fat weighed equally on his scale, along with the Tappan Zee Bridge, stars and evolution. When I first read his stories, he was a relief to overwhelming teenage existentialism. Updike knew how to explain being a boy, falling in love, staring at neon lights.
Only upon reading that he had died did I realise why the coloured squares over the East River have made so much sense to me since I moved here several months ago.
On a November Tuesday, the kind of blowy day that gives you earache, the sign was set in place by eighteen men, the youngest of whom would some day be an internationally known film actor. At three-thirty, an hour and a half before they were supposed to quit, they knocked off and dispersed, because the goddamn job was done. Thus the Spry sign (thus the river, the trees, thus babies and sleep) came to be.
Above its winking, the small cities had disappeared. The black of the river was as wide as that of the sky. Reflections sunk in it existed dimly, minutely wrinkled, below the surface. The Spry sign occupied the night with no company beyond the also uncreated but illegible stars.
~ "Toward Evening", John Updike (1956)- John Updike shaped the minutia of life into some kind of grand narrative. Arcing baseballs and neon signs for cooking fat weighed equally on his scale, along with the Tappan Zee Bridge, stars and evolution. When I first read his stories, he was a relief to overwhelming teenage existentialism. Updike knew how to explain being a boy, falling in love, staring at neon lights.
Only upon reading that he had died did I realise why the coloured squares over the East River have made so much sense to me since I moved here several months ago.On a November Tuesday, the kind of blowy day that gives you earache, the sign was set in place by eighteen men, the youngest of whom would some day be an internationally known film actor. At three-thirty, an hour and a half before they were supposed to quit, they knocked off and dispersed, because the goddamn job was done. Thus the Spry sign (thus the river, the trees, thus babies and sleep) came to be.
Above its winking, the small cities had disappeared. The black of the river was as wide as that of the sky. Reflections sunk in it existed dimly, minutely wrinkled, below the surface. The Spry sign occupied the night with no company beyond the also uncreated but illegible stars.
~ "Toward Evening", John Updike (1956)- So much a writer in kinship with John Cheever - post by jillianm
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