The world is a little poorer tonight, not because of the Dow Jones or Nasdaq, but because today, January 27, 2009, the American writer John Updike died.
This past week, while attending a meeting in Daytona Beach, I took along one of Updike’s story collections, Problems, and read in the evening and on the plane. The stories were about sex and loneliness and difficult relationships and religious faith. Updike, even when he made me laugh, brought me more deeply into the human condition – with all its frailty and foibles and joy and wonder. Updike was a novelist, story writer, poet, literary critic, and essayist. He was prolific, and has a new story collection due out later this year, a final gift to the human community he sought to portray, enliven and enrich.
A few years ago, I bought a tape collection of poets reading their work, including Updike reading one of his poems. Hearing it and reading it, it grew into a favorite of mine. I appreciate the celebration of the simple gift of a day.
An Oddly Lovely Day Alone
The kids went off to school,
the wife to the hairdresser,
or so she said, in Boston –
“He takes forever, ‘Bye.”
I read a book, doing my job.
Around eleven, the rat man came –
our man from Pest Control,
though our rats have long since died.
He wears his hair rat-style –
cut short, brushed back – and told me
his minister had written a book
and “went on television with it.”
The proceeds, however, unlike mine,
would be devoted, every cent,
to a missionary church
in Yucatan.
Time went by silently. For lunch,
I warmed up last night’s pizza,
and added my plate to the dishwasher,
and soap, and punched FULL CYCLE.
A book, a box of raisins,
and bed. The phone rang once,
a woman whose grant had not come through,
no fault of mine.
“That’s all right,” I told her.
“Just yesterday,
I failed to win
the National Book Critics Circle Prize.”
The book was good. The bed was warm.
Each hour seemed a rubber band
the preoccupied fingers of God
were stretching at His desk.
A thump, not a dishwasher thump.
The afternoon paper: it said
an earthquake had struck Iran
mere minutes after the shah had left.
The moral seemed clear enough.
More time passed, darkening.
All suddenly unbeknownst,
the afternoon had begun to snow –
to darken, darken and snow:
a fantastic effect, widespread.
If people don’t entertain you,
Nature will.
Tonight, after my late local news, I turned on Nightline to see if there was going to be a story about John Updike’s passing. There was not. What was on instead were stories about a Seattle preacher named Mark Driscoll who believes Jesus was man enough to let people know they were going to hell, and who encourages Christian married couples to enjoy sex with imagination and gusto, and about Joan Rivers. I turned it off to write, and could not help but feel sad for a culture that thinks it is news that some preacher talks both Jesus and sex and that Joan Rivers is still around – another celebrity reinventing herself – and forgets to mention that today we lost one of our literary treasures.
Even so, I write with faith and with feathers.
David
