John Updike, 1932-2009

One of my absolute favorite poems is by John Updike:

Seven Stanzas for Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

When I first read today of Updike's passing I felt an ambiguous loss.  Since my high school days I have always had a fascination and admiration for Updike's prolific and sustained literary output.  I'm not a tremendous fan of his work and I have only read him in fits and starts, but I have always followed his career, and his work is, without a doubt, one of the most important literary contributions to 20th Century American literature.

Some have called in to the conversation whether Chiam Potok would be a good model for Mormon literature.  I think John Updike would be a more interesting model in exploring the possibilities of Mormon literature.  Though his territory may have been the Narcisstic White Male, Updike dissected the vagaries of Protestant guilt, along with it's middle class discontents and pleasures, with precision and eloquence.

But the time for contrast and comparison is for another day.  Tonight I mourn the loss of a literary giant.  I will miss his art criticism in the NYRB.  I will miss his reviews and short stories in the New Yorker.  But most of all, I will miss his erudite and thoughtful perspective in our image saturated age.  He is truly one of the greats writers of the 20th Century.

For more.

Comments

[Stephen M (Ethesis)]

I remember Chiam Potok speaking at BYU and felt he would make a great model for LDS literature as he wrote constantly about the interactions of cultures and the questions they answered and the ones they did not.

weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, ...

[Doug & Laurel]

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