October 14-19
Heading towards Boston on my virtual world tour, I've taken a side trip to revisit a town where I've never set foot, Shillington PA. John Updike's childhood home opens there as a museum this very week. Updike fans know the place well enough from his fiction, poetry, and essays for it to feel like a home they remember.
[PHOTO: With most, but not all, of the Updike books I've read, I'm pictured in front of the old Updike home in Shillington, PA, now a museum.]
When I covered the last 24 miles on a bike trail near Atlanta yesterday, the sunlight was so clear and the October air so clean and dry that I could count the needles on a pine 100 feet ahead. That's how John Updike's writing is, precise to the tiniest detail, spacious to encompass an entire time and place. It's been refreshing to read his work again to prepare for this visit.
In his poetry collection Endpoint, completed during his final illness, Updike tells why he returned so often to his Shillington years in his work. "I've written these before, these modest facts, / but their meaning has no bottom in my mind" (27). Updike expresses gratitude that his words have "formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts" (19).
That same desire to praise and preserve what I've loved is what drives me to write this blog. Updike wrote elsewhere that it's an act of worship to describe as accurately and honestly as possible what the Creator has made.
In his last years, Updike returned to the old place in valedictory stories and poems that are deeply moving. See my blogposts Endpoint: Light at Sunset (04/2009), My Father's Tears: The Updike Variations (07/2009). In Jung Over: Geography of the Self (04/2013), having re-read the Shillington part of Updike's memoir Self-Consciousness, I reflect on a dream of my own personal "Shillington." See my Updike page for a curated list of blogposts about his work and about him.
←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow my bike tour from the start.
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