Reading Updike

I could feel the skin on the back of my hands wrinkle. My breath slowed down and I felt tired - fatigued all over. As I read, my knees turned rheumatoid, memory wobbly and the air seemed thick with the pallor of sickness. I was reading John Updike writing about age.

I had heard about Updike many times. Between book reviews, amazon links, the Best Short Stories of America and other such discriminators of literary virtue, I finally chanced upon a book of his short stories five years ago at a quaint second hand bookstore (incidentally the first book I ever bought abroad), and painfully left it behind, unread, in the aircraft. Hope the book made someone else's day.

Then, in 2012 at a Strand Sale, I came across his last book 'My Fathers' Tears', about age and death, published posthumously. From hard hearted reviews that I read, this book did not impress the literati. It was seen, as a tiring master's last attempt. A master Updike certainly was, with virtuoso skills in constructing his prose.

Like all great literature, Updike's stories convey much more than what he actually wrote. The words are lyrical, roll off your mental tongue easily and build an atmosphere quietly which crawls under your skin while you least notice it. Only when you end a story does the impact punch in, especially in the story I liked best 'The Walk with Elizanne'. It speaks of a 50th high school reunion, where Dave meets Elizanne (his girlfriend of 50 years ago) and with her prompting recalls when they walked home and first kissed. It ends with the most poignant note a story could ever end with.

The book speaks of age which we do not notice passing. One day, you are 18 with a whole range of possibilities ahead of you, 50 years later seems to be a philosophical intangible truth, everyone says it will come but will it really is what you are thinking, till you realize another day, when you find yourself 70, that life has just passed by. What days and moments could not tell you, a collection of years has laid bare. Updike weaves through this realization in his stories - of relationships, imagination, fears and favors and while doing this connects the right points.

The hallmark of every unremarkable life is its recap in indignantly sorrowful misery. What had to happen has already happened. A once fluid future has transformed into a now un-mutating past.  If only time rolls back, if only I have another chance, if only I would have done that what would have been, what could have been.

Your beliefs, ideals, actions mostly do not matter for the stage to which you have reached - success, social status, disease and misfortune are determined by chance and choice.  The chance gets to your guts, almost hurting for it never is and never was just. The choices haunt you forever, for those are where the could-have-beens of life are consigned to the Neverlands of imagination.