R.I.P?

I've been absent for quite a while now, with little, if anything to say. My grandfather passed away and with all things considered, and there are a few to consider, writing my blog became not secondary, but irrelevant. I am glad I waited or the entire entry would have been about my Jewish brethren who refused to bury him. However misplaced my anger and sadness, it would have been then and remains true. It seems, or perhaps it only became evident to me now with my grandfather's death, that death is all around me. It is mostly ugly and devastating, with no regard for the dying or the living, who, upon slightly deeper observation, are also dying. What an ill-designed process, driving people to create entire religions to substantiate nothingness. And the gentleman sitting across from me on the train, in western dress and the hand of god on his balding head, babbling 5 thousand year old nonsense, he is only hoping for the best, I am sure. And I too, I hope for the best.

John Updike died. He and my grandpa were the same age. My grandpa likely had not heard of Updike; and Updike, most certainly, did not know of grandpa. Of people I didn't know, he's made the biggest impact on me. The responses to the sad news flooded the New York Times site. People from all over the world wrote in expressing sadness, but mostly gratitude for his work. Here are just a few of my favorite Updike quotes:

"We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one."

"Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it."

"I don't think God plays well in Sweden," he said. "God sticks pretty close to the equator."

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”