… has died.

*****************************

So I walked out in the snow to pick up dinner and go to the library, and at the library I took out a couple of Updike books: Problems and Other Stories and Bech: A Book.

While waiting for my pizza I opened the short stories and found them both beautifully written and hilarious.

As always when hovering above the dim oval of porcelain, he recalls the most intense vision of beauty his forty years have granted him. It was after a lunch in New York. The luncheon had been gay, prolonged, overstimulating, vinous. Now he was in a taxi, heading up the West Side Highway. At the 57th Street turnoff, the need to urinate was a feathery subliminal thought; by the Seventies (where Riverside Drive begins to rise like an airplane), it was a real pressure; by the Nineties (Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument crumbling, Riverside Park a green cliff looming), it had become a murderous imperative. Mastering shame, the man confessed his agony to the driver, who, gradually suspending disbelief, swung off the highway at 158th Street and climbed a little cobblestone mountain and found there, evidently not for the first time, a dirty triangular garage. Mechanics, black or blackened, stared with white eyes as the strange man stumbled past them, back through the oily and junk-lined triangle to the apex: here, pinched between obscene frescoes, sat the most beautiful thing he ever saw. Or would ever see. It was a toilet bowl, a toilet bowl in its flawed whiteness, its partial wateriness, its total receptiveness: in the harmonious miracle of its infrangible and unvariable ens. The beautiful is, precisely, what you need at the time.

Or take this sentence – what a marvelous sentence – from Nevada:

The Humboldt River, which had sustained the pioneer caravans, shadowed the expressway shyly, tinting its valley with a dull green that fed dottings of cattle.

… to get us going for the New Year.

“If one follow Blake’s mind through the several stages of his poetic development it is impossible to regard him as a naïf, a wild man, a wild pet for the supercultivated. The strangeness is evaporated, the peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry: something which is found (not everywhere) in Homer and Æschylus and Dante and Villon, and profound and concealed in the work of Shakespeare—and also in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza. It is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying. It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant. Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry. Nothing that can be called morbid or abnormal or perverse, none of the things which exemplify the sickness of an epoch or a fashion, have this quality; only those things which, by some extraordinary labour of simplification, exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the human soul.

… Blake …  knew what interested him, and he therefore presents only the essential, only, in fact, what can be presented, and need not be explained. And because he was not distracted, or frightened, or occupied in anything but exact statement, he understood. He was naked, and saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal. To him there was no more reason why Swedenborg should be absurd than Locke. He accepted Swedenborg, and eventually rejected him, for reasons of his own. He approached everything with a mind unclouded by current opinions. There was nothing of the superior person about him. This makes him terrifying…”

T.S. Eliot,  The Sacred Wood