Poorhouse Fair

John Updike

Living here, where there is no cause to be jealous--for don't you believe jealousy is the one real sin?--I've learned how sweet a human presence is, how timid, and safe. Yet when I could see, as a girl, I hated people--hated them terribly. They could run without tripping, and eat their food without spilling--my own eating was so unpleasant, I imagined, for others to watch. My sister would read to me; I hated her. I believed my parents loved her and only pitied me. There were so many jokes I couldn't understand. I must have set my ears against them. I know I indulged my disability in order to hurt my parents. Yet when my sight fell away finally, all those busy angry patches I couldn't quite make sense of, everything changed. A voice wasn't a twisted face but something musical. I could sit in a room with my parents and feel their emotions washing my sides, and hear a thousand details in their speech they were ignorant of, and feel my being in the room turn them toward gaiety and reverence. For when I was a young girl in my teens my presence did that.

Thus pronouncing Hook had a very clear inner apprehension of what virtue was: An austerity of the hunt, a manliness from which comes all life, so that it can be written that the woman takes her life from the man. As the Indian once served the elusive deer he hunted, men once served invisible goals, and grew hard in such service and pursuit, and lent their society an indispensable shadow. Impotent to provide this tempering salt, men would sink lower than women, as indeed they had. Women are the heroes of dead lands.

Life as a tragedy of misunderstandings. Updike works a story of people who consistently and misunderstand each other in small ways and it reminds me of life and startles me because somehow everything still works and goes on and we haven't all lost our heads and started hitting each other with rocks. But there is skill in the way Updike tells the story from everyone's perspective and it is a good feeling when you slowly start to realize that the problems of the story, of the characters' lives wouldn't be as bad or even wouldn't exist if they weren't assuming so much about each other and life.
We ain't never going to stop assuming, that should be a given of life, but perhaps we can work to change the atoms from which we operate and that might create in us a new, better way of living together. The question of every grievance that life (read: other people) have visited on us becomes perhaps a question of the rough nature of life itself. In most cases, the pain we feel is only the fault of living and life, though it be shared to us by other people. For whatever reason, living is pain and living with other people is hurting them. Since we know this, the love we share for each other can be that much greater. Maybe.
Poorhouse Fair will confuse you with its perspectives. Enjoy the confusion because it might help you to recognize the state of your own life.