Were I to die, no one would say,
‘Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise – depths unplumbable!
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
‘I thought he died a while ago.’
For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.
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A nice unexciting final piece, which reminded me, in its last lines, of Harold Brodkey’s last lines in This Wild Darkness, written also just before his death. These lines, though prose, are more poetic than Updike’s:
One may be tired of the world — tired of the prayer-makers, the poem-makers, whose rituals are distracting and human and pleasant but worse than irritating because they have no reality — while reality itself remains very dear. One wants glimpses of the real. God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle — or instruction. I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. I don’t know what I am doing. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and the instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.
*************************************
Life’s a shabby subterfuge. Reality remains very dear. One wants glimpses of the real.
Death is real and dark and huge, writes Updike. Yet these vague words don’t work as powerfully as the precision — the gorgeous, bizarre precision — of Brodkey’s fevered mind, which finds, even as it shuts down, a glorious image through which to convey the gradual fading away of physical integrity as one floats off into death.
Both writers evoke the shabby subterfuge of life, the noontime show of reassurance we make; and our sense, as day lengthens, of our self-deceit.
January 30th, 2009 at 12:48PM
I haven’t fallen in love with all of Updike’s work, but i do love his candid writing style; his passing is a sad loss indeed
January 30th, 2009 at 1:34PM
I agree – not just his candid style, but his cool ironic eye that somehow manages to retain a sense of empathy…
July 16th, 2013 at 12:12AM
[…] as John Updike wrote, life’s a shabby subterfuge; certainly the last few years at Rutgers and the UMDNJ have been shabby in the extreme. Under its […]
October 31st, 2013 at 9:28AM
Some years ago I was stricken by a condition, which like the flu, doesn’t kill you but makes you wish that it would. I have spent much of the last year feeling as if I were at Death’s door and for the most part housebound. I have often found myself ignoring Nietzsche’s cautionary observation that if you stare too long into the abyss, it will stare back into you.
This staring contest in which I now regularly engage strikes me as being similar to taking on the Zen koan “Nothingness” whereby the practitioner meditates on “Nothingness”, but unlike Updike et al, eschews conceptual constructs, judgments or conclusions.
November 8th, 2013 at 9:13AM
lee: I’m probably responding too late to your comment for you to read this, but yes! I think precisely what makes Updike’s poem less than inspiring to me is the flat angry “subterfuge” business, as opposed to the richer zen-like approach you mention. Thanks for the comment.