His achievement of immortality through writing suggests a lesson for
each of us. The act of writing is just that--a separate phenomena from
publishing. it is the act of writing that freezes those fleeting moments
that coalesce into Self-Consciousness.
The current plethora of published journals illustrates this truth. Beyond
self-consciousness, he found practical uses for writing. Updike once overheard
his wife tell an interviewer that he was the best-tempered person she ever
knew. Updike speculates that his good temper
must be the daily venting of words that makes me so, because as a child I often felt irate and frantic, and have fought all my life sensations of being smothered and confined, misunderstood and put-upon.His religion has been the subject of my thought and my mother's disbelief for some time. A recent literary discussion put my group portraying him as one of the greatest living writers in the English language while the other used the appellation, "Trash!" He explains the source of these conflicting assessments
I have felt free to describe life as accurately as I could, with especial attention to human erosions and betrayals. What small faith I have has given me what artistic courage I have. My theory was that God already knows everything and cannot be shocked. And only truth is useful. Only truth can be built upon. From a higher, inhuman point of view, only truth, however harsh, is holy.At times, his justifications become starkly theological
I had learned from Kierkegaard and Barth to say the worst about our earthly condition, which was hopeless without a scandalous supernatural redemption.There is much of Updike in each of us and he writes of much of us. His collection of autobiographical pieces, Self Consciousness, tells us this. It tells us because it confirms that which we knew, those images, those scenes over his "millions of words" are true.
© 1998 by Ernest W. Seckinger Jr
Odd
Jobs (Also check Bibliofind.com)
Hugging
the Shore