Celebrating Updike Once More
Julian Barnes has a lovely, perceptive, and quite personal tribute to John Updike in the latest New York Review of Books. It ends:
In his very last story, “The Full Glass” (published in The New Yorker on May 26, 2008), a former insurance salesman turned floor sander, now approaching eighty, reviews his life through the prism of water (the sea, the body’s constitution, human tears, the glass of the stuff he needs to swallow his “life-prolonging pills”). Most people tend to see life as a glass that is, according to temperament, half-full or half-empty. This (for once unnamed) first-person narrator prefers to retrospect in terms of “moments of that full-glass feeling.” The story’s last sentence, in which the narrator stands back and looks at himself—or Updike stands back and looks at the narrator, or Updike stands back and looks at himself—runs:
If I can read this strange old guy’s mind aright, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.
Impossible not to think of and feel for Updike as he tapped out that sentence and then added his last full stop, his fictional endpoint. Impossible equally not to honor and thank him with a reader’s raised glass, full to the brim—though preferably not with water.
Robert:
We are, all of us, destined to down the contents of that glass. May yours, and mine, be as full as Mr. Updike’s was. La chaim!
Carey Rowland, author of Glass half-Full
Let’s try this: another example of someone who saw the Glass Half Full:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5IIXeR5OUI
Thank you, Nancy, it makes for a good ending to a lovely day/holiday
Delighted to see that the delightful Barnes picks the delightful Roger’s Version as his fave; it’s mine too.
Professor, I put this up on Cathleen Kaveny’s blog next in line, because she dealt with Notre Dame and thougut it OK to repeat it here.
Cathleen Kaveny, may I borrow your space? An important article needs our attention. It is in http://www.Chiesa where Sandro Magister has published an “unconventional analysis by the theologian Robert Imbelli” at: http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1338633?eng=y. The title of the entire piece is: ” Obama Graduates from Notre Dame, But the Bishops Are Making Him Retake the Exam.” Professor Imbelli’s article is entitled: ” Conflict and Hope at the University of Notre Dame.” Magister discusses the triumvirate of American conservative Catholics: Deal Hudson, Michael Novak, George Weigel. He writes of Cardinal George, L’Osservatore Romano and the Vatican’s attitude. He then publishes in full Robert Imbelli’s analysis. At the end he provides links to the following: Obama’s address; John Noonan’s comments on the Laetare Medal; each article by Hudson, Novak and Weigel; The entire piece is a balance of all views on the Notre Dame Commencement, with all views being collected and presented in one place, plus links to each of the full articles mentioned. No subscription is required to access http://www.chiesa‘s Home Page at: http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/?eng=y
This is just my opinion, if Notre Dame is sincere about dialogue on the issue of abortion and holds firm to the Universal Truth that abortion is wrong, why has there yet to be anything on the University of Notre Dame’s website promoting the newly established Fund For Human Life? This is not the response we have all been Praying for.
Father, thank you for your words of wisdom. The Truth regarding abortion is already “out”.
http://newsinfo.nd.edu/news/11016-center-for-ethics-and-culture-establishes-fund
Thank you, Mr. Kelly — I’ve just put up a new post linking to Fr. Imbelli’s article. (That’s the place to comment on it.)