Words&Dirt

John Updike gets some extra love today because I really dig his writing.

“‘Hold still.  Just sit there.  I see you very clear all of a sudden.  You’re Mr. Death himself.  You’re not just nothing, you’re worse than nothing.  You’re not a rat, you don’t stink, you’re not enough to stink.’

‘Look, I didn’t do anything.  I was coming to see you when it happened.’

‘No, you don’t do anything.  You just wander around with the kiss of death.  Get out.  Honest to God, Rabbit, just looking at you makes me sick.'”

––Rabbit, Run, by John Updike, pg. 260

“There is light, though, in the streetlights; muffled by trees their mingling cones retreat to the unseen end of Summer Street.  Nearby, to his left, directly under one, the rough asphalt looks like dimpled snow.  He decides to walk around the block, to clear his head and pick his path.  Funny, how what makes you move is so simple and the field you must move in is so crowded.  His legs take strength from the distinction, scissor along evenly.  Goodness lies inside, there is nothing outside, those things he was trying to balance have no weight.  He feels his inside as very real suddenly, a pure blank space in the middle of a dense net.  I don’t know, he kept telling Ruth; he doesn’t know, what to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn’t know seems to make him infinitely small and impossible to capture.  Its smallness fills him like a vastness.  It’s like when they heard you were great and put two men on you and no matter which way you turned you bumped into one of them and the only thing to do was pass.  So you passed and the ball belonged to the others and your hands were empty and the men on you looked foolish because in effect there was nobody there.”

––Rabbit, Run, by John Updike, pg. 264