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John Updike on Making Peace with Our Past Selves
“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?...
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The Walk Back from the Mailbox
“And the other morning, a Sunday morning, around nine, walking back up my driveway in my churchgoing clothes, having retrieved the Sunday Globe from my mailbox, I experienced happiness so sharply I...
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The Girls of Fall
“Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to...
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“Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children” by John Updike
They will not be the same next time. The sayings so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected. Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in the more securely to the worldly buzz of television,...
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“Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth” by John Updike
They’ve been in my fiction; both now dead, Peggy just recently, long stricken (like my Grandma) with Parkinson’s disease. But what a peppy knockout Peggy was!— cheerleader, hockey star, May Queen, RN....
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John Updike: Is It Selfish to Want an Afterlife?
“Do I really want it, this self, these scattered fingerprints on the air, to persist forever, to outlast the atomic universe? Those who scoff at the Christian hope of an afterlife have on their side...
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John Updike: What I Believe
“A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. At the age of 73, I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing… I also believe, instinctively,...
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“Perfection Wasted” by John Updike
And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, which took a whole life to develop and market — the quips, the witticisms, the slant adjusted to a few, those loved...
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“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on...
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What John Updike Thought about the Afterlife
“Karl Barth, another Reformed clergyman, responding in an interview late in his life to a question about the afterlife, said he imagined it as somehow this life in review, viewed in a new light. I had...
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