John Updike, U & me

Another fallen hero...

I once published a brief comment about John Updike's aversion to materialist metaphysics. He had written, in his reluctant memoir Self-consciousness:

"When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept—the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation."

I wrote:

Updike may appear to yearn for the supernatural, but in fact his books are full of appreciation for the natural, simple satisfactions of everyday life. He would love nothing more, it seems, than to "be a self forever."

That's still how I read him. I wish he could be a self forever, here amongst the selves we're sure of, for my own selfish reasons as one of his most admiring readers; and because he was the theist whose charm and intelligence and humanity most tempered my inclination to dismiss theism as nothing but the residue of pre-scientific superstition.

It is very sad to think of his no longer being here. What a vast space of "emotion and conscience, memory and intention and sensation" for us all to try and fill. Who will temper me now?

Addendum: Garrison Keillor has penned a very nice tribute to Mr. Updike, eliciting from me a brief further comment...

Very nice tribute to a very great man whose greatness was out of all proportion to his humilty and generosity of spirit. I've posted my own humble tribute to him at http://delightsprings.blogspot.com/ and though I never met him, I think (based on something he told Terri Gross about his distress in contemplating the intrusions of biographers, even friendly ones) he would say that as an admiring reader I did, sort of, know the best of him.

Are We There Yet, Martin?

"MLK helped pave the road to the White House for Obama, but it will take more than Tuesday's inauguration to fulfill King's dream." -Joan Walsh, salon.com.

Right. It will take a recognition that we are and always have been a polyglot society. If we're going to judge Americans by the contents of their characters, we've got to stop being so fixated on their blackness and whiteness - and their redness and blueness. All of our ancestry is "mixed." We still seem pretty mixed up about that.

Patrick McGoohan, 1928-2009

Nice tree-hugger tribute to "The Prisoner" - "I am not a number, I am a free man." His appeal is still strong, because simply being a free man or woman is still more the challenge of our times.

A new signature

January seems like a good time to try out a new email signature. Nothing wrong with the old ones, they're just... old.

This worked especially well last month:

"Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation." -William James

And this was a good signature for all seasons:

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." -Douglas Adams

But I think I'll begin the new year with this, wordy though it is:

"It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed. Privileged, and not just privileged to enjoy our planet. More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever... Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?" -Richard Dawkins

A good question

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? -"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

This year's edge.org annual question invites speculation on the murky, over-the-technological-rainbow future. Lots of interesting responses...

Happy New Year

Old Nietzsche was right about one thing - the best ideas arise during walks. This year I resolve to keep on walking, and feeding my passion for perambulation. One delightful source of nourishment: Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism (Riverhead Bks 2008).

More on this soon.

Be Good for Heaven's Sake?

Nearly half of Americans surveyed in a recent Pew study, Charles Blow reports, said that "atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go." They thought "you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person," no specific faith-based dogmas required.

Wow. I'm guessing respondents from my region were not proportionately represented in this survey, but still... I won't kick and scream, as long as the door to heaven opens both ways. I'd love to go and investigate Mark Twain's observation that hell must be lots more fun.

Is this a testament to the tolerant pluralism of average believing Americans? Or just another way of misrepresenting the moral life and making goodness instrumental to the gain of eternal reward? No. Be good for goodness' sake.

Merry Christmas

I just listened to an annoying radio interview with Jose Feliciano, who was asked if he worried that anyone in the world might ever tire of hearing "Feliz Navidad." The gist of his reply: only the atheists are likely to tire of this tune and its simple message ("I want to wish you a merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart" etc. etc. ad infinitum) - and atheists don't like anything anyway.

Well, Jose, we like plenty - thank you very much. And I do want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. I don't believe a virgin ever birthed a savior, but I'm happy to celebrate the birth of anyone who brought or brings tidings of peace, love, and understanding. I'm sure Jose is not alone in thinking that atheists are only nattering nabobs of negativism. That's a misconception, and I'll be doing my best to correct it when I teach a course next Fall I'm tentatively calling "Atheism: Old and New." My mission: make it clear to students that renouncing belief in God is not tantamout to renouncing life and spirit and meaning and hope.

This is my first post in this forum since July - and that was itself a cameo appearance. I'll probably blog again, but never again (I think) on a self-imposed schedule. I have a cartoon on my office wall: "Thank goodness you're here," says the desk-bound Everyman to Mr. Death, "I never get anything done without a deadline."

In fact, deadlines per se don't motivate me, except negatively: I resist and defy and recoil. But perhaps thinking about death, in some strange way, does inspire. My last post concerned the very public death of Randy Pausch. What was much on my mind then, but unacknowledged, was my Dad's leukemia-induced decline. He passed in September, after nearly eight decades of a salutary life. That loss feels heavier today than it has most days since.

I've not consoled myself at all with thoughts of eternity or reunion in heaven, and cannot. In one of our last significant conversations, I shared with Dad an exchange between William James and his own fatally-ill father, in 1882:

"As for the other side, and Mother, and our all possibly meeting, I can't say anything..."

Well, I can say of such a reunion that I don't expect it and - if faith is a condition - don't deserve it. But my disbelief is not simply a negation, it is an affirmation of the life he lived on Earth, and the example he set for those of us who attended and will follow. It is a commitment to pass the torch he handed me and my siblings to my own children, to the best of my ability. I'm not looking for a transcendental bailout. I don't think he was either.

Randy Pausch

Professor Randy Pausch, whose "last lecture" and high-profile struggle with pancreatic cancer won wide admiration and sympathy, died yesterday.

I passed my copy of Randy’s book along to my Dad, recently diagnosed with leukemia. He was moved and inspired by it, as was I. We agreed that for a young man with small children to muster such a courageous response to a terminal diagnosis - stoical but also joyous and celebratory - is truly heroic. I’m so grateful that Randy was willing to share his story and his example with the world.

Still here...

...and still trying to decide whether to blog or not to blog, after a five month hiatus. Life has been eventful and full without it, can't say I've missed this forum much. In fact, I probably wouldn't be posting at all if I (1) were teaching summer school and (2) didn't have projects and deadlines to procrastinate about.

But for the record, I am still living and breathing and attempting, sporadically, to think. Maybe I'll yet decide to share some of the results with the wide, distracted world.