Requiem for John Updike

John Updike died today. I have kept a quote of his in my "Favorites" file for 30 years, just because it said so much about how to write and how to love and how to live. It was from the story, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth." I wrote it out in blue ballpoint pen on the back of my mother's business stationary when I was about 13 years old."

"And about love. `Love' is one of those words that illustrate what happens to an old, overworked langauge. These days, with movie stars and crooners and preachers and psychiatrists all pronoiuncing the word, it's come to mean nothing but a vague fondness for something. In this sense, I lvoe the rain, this blackboard, these desks, you. It means nothing, you see, whereas once the word signified a quite explicit thing -- a desire to share all you own and are with someone else. It is time we coined a new word to mean that, and when you think up the word you want to use, I suggest that you be economical with it. Treat it as something you can spend only once -- if not for your own sake, for the good of the language."