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.”
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In its recent March 16th issue, the New Yorker has published several of John Updike’s new poems. It is curious, to say the least, that Updike chose to “muse” or rather “anti-muse” the expectation of death through poems- poems like Hospital, Oblong Ghosts or Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth. His poetry, therefore, in my view came to chronicle his sickness, forcing Updike into a new last role, that of an auto-journalist.
“ Benign big blond machine beyond all price, it swallows us up and slowly spits us out half-deafened and our blood still dyed: all this to mask the simple dismal fact that we decay and find our term of life is fixed” (from Hospital); “A wakeup call? It seems that death has found the portals it will enter by: my lungs, pathetic oblong ghosts, one paler than the other on the doctor’s viewing screen” (from Oblong Ghosts); “Cheerleeder, hockey star, May Queen, RN” (from Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth)
PS:” I think of those I loved and saw to die: my Grampop in his nightshirt on the floor” (from Updike’s Hospital)
By the way, it is great you are back on Polinaland (or in? or with?)
A nice, but pretty pessimistic, post Pol.
I think, rather, that life is pretty wonderful. Though, to be honest, I'm not sure what life is, or what death is for that matter. But for me, the universe is a terrible and beautiful, cold expanse, in which, out of all of its infinite masses, we few have been given the opportunity to gape around in wonder, at least for a bit. And while we suffer many pains, at least we get to look about; asteroids certainly don't get that opportunity, and I wouldn't want to be an asteroid... yet.
As for death, I like best what Vonnegut said of it: "so it goes."
"Вычитая из меньшего большее, из человека - время,
Получаешь в остатке слова..."
(И.Бродский)
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