I've nothing to report today as I'm getting ready to fly home. However, I thought I'd leave you with a couple of quotes from John Updike:
John Updike –Self-consciousness
Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we
wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one
could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? It is even
possible to dislike our old selves, those disposable ancestors of ours. For
instance, my high-school self — skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be
noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons
and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless
high school — strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot:
without his frantic ambition and insecurity I would not be sitting on (as my
present home was named by others) Haven Hill....
Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a
presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable.
That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both
unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody. In
the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of
one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in
panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of
the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture
and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even
the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our
personal death. Writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting,
prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy.
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