Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Two for the price of one. Or, John Updike says (quotes of the day)...

Prompted by the sad news of John Updike's death, I started reading A Month of Sundays last week. It was a rather arbitrary pick. I just grabbed something of Updike's I'd never read before off the shelf at Half Price Books. I should have read it sooner. And I will probably read it twice. The protagonist is a minister who is the son of a minister and grew up in a parsonage. As the daughter of a minister who grew up in a parsonage, I am enjoying it on a very personal level. A sampling:

"How the fallen world sparkled, now that my faith was decisively lost!"

"I vowed to abjure the word "love," yet write of little else. Let us think of it as the spiritual twin of gravity -- no crude force, "exerted" by the planets in their orbits, but somehow simply, Einsteinly there, a mathematical property of space itself. Some people and places just make us feel heavier than others, is all."

Speaking of heavy things, that last sentence reminds me of this:

Dan Auerbach's live video of "Trouble Weighs a Ton" (duet with his uncle, James Quine)

"Trouble Weighs a Ton"

1 comment:

Paul said...

if love is gravity, then i'd like to meet a black hole.