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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: identity

The Walk Back from the Mailbox

17 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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Faith, God, happiness, identity, John Updike, joy, Life, nature, religion, Self-Consciousness, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Wisdom

John Updike 2

“And the other morning, a Sunday morning, around nine, walking back up my driveway in my churchgoing clothes, having retrieved the Sunday Globe from my mailbox, I experienced happiness so sharply I tried to factor it into its components. (1) The Christmas season was over — the presents, the parties, the ‘overshadowing’ — and that was a relief. (2) My wife and I had just made love, successfully all around, which at my age occasions some self-congratulation. (3) It was a perfect winter day, windless, with fresh snow heaped along the driveway by the plow and a cobalt-blue sky precisely fitted against the dormered roof-line of my house. I admired this blank blue sky…

Even toward myself, as my own life’s careful manager and promoter, I feel a touch of disdain. Precociously conscious of the precious, inexplicable burden of selfhood, I have steered my unique little craft carefully, at the same time doubting that carefulness is the most sublime virtue. He that gains his life shall lose it.

In this interim of gaining and losing, it clears the air to disbelieve in death and to believe that the world was created to be praised. But I inherited a skeptical temperament. My father believed in science and my mother in nature. She looked and still looks to the plants and the animals for orientation, and I have absorbed the belief that when in doubt we should behave, if not like monkeys, like ‘savages’ — that our instincts and appetites are better guides, for a healthy life, than the advice of other human beings. People are fun, but not quite serious or trustworthy in the way that nature is. We feel safe, huddled within human institutions — churches, banks, madrigal groups — but these concoctions melt away at the basic moments. The self’s responsibility, then, is to achieve rapport if not rapture with the giant, cosmic other: to appreciate, let’s say, the walk back from the mailbox.”

__________

John Updike, writing in the concluding paragraphs of his memoir Self-Consciousness.

More from Updike:

  • On making peace with our past selves
  • On why he was a Christian
  • On why, despite tragedy, he believed the world to be good

John Updike, Ipswich, Massachusetts, 1962

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Saul Bellow on What It Means to Be a Man in Modern Society

09 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

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Tags

Community, Eugene Goodheart, Fiction, Herzog, identity, Industry, Life, manhood, masculinity, modern life, modernism, Mortality, National Book Award, National Medal of Arts, Nobel Prize, novel, Pulitzer Prize, Saul Bellow, science, society, Urban Life, Writing, Zachary Leader

Saul Bellow

“For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass.

Transformed by science. Under organized power.

Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you enjoyed delicious old-fashioned Values? You — you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.”

__________

An excerpt from the novel Herzog by Saul Bellow. (This paragraph also makes up the entire prologue of Ian McEwan’s Solar.)

In the Spring of 2005, while on his deathbed in Brookline, Massachusetts, Bellow — husband to five wives and father to three sons; perhaps the most decorated American author of all time; winner of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, National Medal of Arts, and thrice the National Book Award — was drifting in and out of consciousness when he mustered the energy to turn to his friend Eugene Goodheart, present at his bedside, and enunciate an usual question. “Was I a man, or was I a jerk?”

Here we know the connotations of “jerk,” a classic street-talking Bellow locution that stamps any foolish, flaky, or infuriating, usually male, character. But what he meant by “man” is perhaps more obscure and certainly more important. To Bellow (and to Goodheart), man meant mensch: an admirable, responsible human being who, regardless of wealth or prestige, would elicit trust and favorable words from those who know him.

Goodheart responded with a prompt but solemn nod. “You were a man.”

Thus, as his biographer Zachary Leader summarizes in the video below, “What mattered at the end… was the life he led as a man.”

More Saul:

  • My favorite passage from Bellow, on the promise of mankind
  • Bellow describes everyday life in Israel (from To Jerusalem and Back)
  • Bellow explains why art matters (from his Nobel Prize speech)

Saul Bellow

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John Updike on Making Peace with Our Past Selves

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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Tags

Aging, Biography, consciousness, Ego, F. Scott Fitzgerald, fatherhood, Growth, Haven Hill, High School, identity, Ipswich, John Irving, John Updike, marriage, Maturation, memoir, Mortality, Parenting, Philosophy, Self-Consciousness, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Selves, Shillington, Writing

John Updike

“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, these 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 now be sitting on (as my present home was named by others) Haven Hill. And my Ipswich self, a delayed second edition of that high-school self, in a town much like Shillington in its blend of sweet and tough, only more spacious and historic and blessedly free of family ghosts, and my own relative position in the ‘gang’ improved, enhanced by a touch of wealth, a mini-Mailer in our small salt-water pond, a stag of sorts in our herd of housewife — flirtatious, malicious, greedy for my quota of life’s pleasures, a distracted, mediocre father and worse husband — he seems another obnoxious show-off, rapacious and sneaky and, in the service of his own ego, remorseless. But, then, am I his superior in anything but caution and years, and how can I disown him without disowning also his useful works, on which I still receive royalties? And when I entertain in my mind these shaggy, red-faced, overexcited, abrasive fellows, I find myself tenderly taken with their diligence, their hopefulness, their ability in spite of all to map a broad strategy and stick with it. So perhaps one cannot, after all, not love them…

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.”

__________

From John Updike’s magisterial study of the internal life, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

Apart from his consistently masterful (and often playful) use of language, the real charm of Updike, at least in this reader’s view, can be boiled down to several factors that don’t exist in another American writer — or at least not in another one of Updike’s caliber. Like his style itself, which constantly bears the marks of a mind at serious play, these attributes exist in relationships that are, in some essential sense, oppositional. His intellect, weighted with a heavy dose of classical philosophy but buoyed by a boyish inquisitiveness; his well-bred WASPiness, clothed in the pastels of New England sans the starch you can smell on the pages of a Fitzgerald or John Irving; his fixation on women, tempered always by the guilt of consistently looking (and usually pursuing) the ones who are — in some sense, and for one reason or another — wrong. Tack all of this atop a Christianity which comprehended doubt, and a cheeriness that could face deep questions, and you have a mind that will always give you something worth seeing – if you can only keep up with such an agile pen.

Looking close at the above paragraph, you’ll recognize all of these attributes. If you do yourself the favor of exploring deeper into Self-Consciousness, you’ll get a better sense of each of them and how they shape the man and his understanding of the conscious and subconscious life.

Read on:

  • Paul Newman reflects: “Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.”
  • Updike explains why he was skeptical as a young man
  • Updike ruminates on how religious belief is ‘a part of being human’

John Updike

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