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72f6588
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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
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teotwawki
rabbit-angstrom
cynicism
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John Updike |
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134e9bc
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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rabbit-angstrom
cruelty
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John Updike |
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0e0878c
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The fucking world is running out of gas.
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rabbit-angstrom
cynicism
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John Updike |
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432cd64
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The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken.
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acoustics
priestcraft
stained-glass-window
rabbit-angstrom
ministry
wedding
church
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John Updike |
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c5810f9
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Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.
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futility
lost-innocence
lost-youth
sense-memory
rabbit-angstrom
childhood
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John Updike |
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3644ee8
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As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood.
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nelson-angstrom
rabbit-angstrom
growing-up
frustration
parenthood
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John Updike |
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6b54072
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He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.
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janice-springer
rabbit-angstrom
sin
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John Updike |
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06d1120
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He sees now that he is rich that these were the [shore] outings of the poor, ending in sunburn and stomach upset. Pop liked crabcakes and baked oysters but could never eat them without throwing up. When the Model A was tucked into the garage and little Mim tucked into bed Harry could hear his father vomiting in a far corner of the yard. He never complained about vomiting or about work, they were just things you had to do, one more regularly than the other.
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rabbit-angstrom
resignation
vacation
class
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John Updike |
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58a89cd
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When he was about twelve or thirteen he walked into his parents' bedroom in the half-house on Jackson Road not expecting his father to be there, and the old man was standing in front of his bureau in just socks and an undershirt, innocently fishing in a drawer for his undershorts, that boxer style that always looked sad and dreary to Harry anyway, and here was his father's bare behind, such white buttocks, limp and hairless, mute and helpless flesh that squeezed out shit once a day and otherwise hung there in the world like linen that hadn't been ironed....
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boxers
rabbit-angstrom
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John Updike |
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dfa5077
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Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.
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rabbit-angstrom
hospital
lust
regret
despair
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John Updike |
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4697bb4
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Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child.
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rabbit-angstrom
middle-age
fat
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John Updike |
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3c2554d
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He settles back with a small handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes.
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rabbit-angstrom
nuts
diet
junk-food
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John Updike |
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b6965c6
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In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise.
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rabbit-angstrom
gluttony
rationalization
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John Updike |
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fd1f521
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He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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rabbit-angstrom
impostor
faking-it
grownups
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John Updike |
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3ae9860
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He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red flame shadowed in black like you see on TV all the time, and he is shocked to find within himself, imagining this, not much emotion, just a cold thrill at being a witness, a kind of bleak wonder at the fury of chemicals, and relief that he hadn't been on the plane himself but was instead safe on this side of the glass, with his faint pronged sense of doom.
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airport
rabbit-angstrom
foreboding
foreshadowing
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John Updike |
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9996840
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Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family talk when both know that what she wants to discuss is her old issue, that flared up a minute ago, of whether he loves her or not, or why at least he doesn't need her as much as she does him. But their relationship at the start was established with her in pursuit of him, and all the years since, of hidden meetings, of wise decisions to end it and thrilling abject collapses back into sex, have not disrupted the fundamental pattern of her giving and his taking, of her fearing their end more than he, and clinging, and disliking herself for clinging, and wanting to punish him for her dislike, and him shrugging and continuing to bask in the sun of her love, that rises every day whether he is there or not. He can't believe it, quite, and has to keep testing her.
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love
rabbit-angstrom
disdain
disparity
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John Updike |
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a8c5add
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Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess's cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Plucked strings, no vocals, music that's used to being ignored, a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death.
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music
airport
memento-mori
rabbit-angstrom
foreshadowing
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John Updike |