The Music School

John Updike

Sweetie, Richard blurted, will they hurt me? The curious fact was that he had never given blood before. Asthmatic and underweight, he had been 4-F, and at college and now at the office he had, less through his own determination than through the diffidence of the solicitors, evaded pledging blood. It was one of those tests of courage so trivial that no one had ever thought to make him face up to it.

The grape leaves outside my window are curiously beautiful. Curiously because it comes upon me as strange, after the long darkness of self-absorption and fear and shame in which I have been living, that things are beautiful, that independent of our catastrophes they continue to maintain the effect, which is the hallmark and specialty of Nature. Nature: this morning it seems to me very clear that Nature may be defined as that which exists without guilt. Our bodies are in Nature; our shoes, their laces, the little plastic tips of the laces--everything around us and about us is in Nature, and yet something holds us away from it, like the upward push of water which keeps us from touching the sandy bottom, ribbed and glimmering with crescental fragments of oyster shell, so clear to our eyes.

Updike reminds me of Ford Maddox Ford. Kind of a bitter guy. There seems to have been a period in American writing, after the Second World War and before the late Eighties (actually it might still be going on) when we were given a series of very tired, very jaded, almost catatonic writers who knew no other subject than familial trouble and ennui. I'm exaggerating a bit, but after The Music School with its repetitive hammer stroke themes, I feel a bit like exaggerating.