lo que hace falta, dixit mr. updike

We do not need men like Proust and Joyce; men like this are a luxury, an added fillip that an abundant culture can produce only after the more basic literary need has been filled[...] This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; men who are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcend the limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic [...] Whatever the many failings of my work,” he concluded, “let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born.

John Updike, carta a sus padres, 1951, a los diescinueve años.

donde ocurre

No soy un fan tremendo de Updike. Quizás porque lo que he leído son sus últimas cosas, y todo el mundo me insiste en que es necesario leer la tetralogía de Rabbit. Que es su obra cumbre. O por lo menos, eso me dicen algunos. Otros me hablan de sus ensayos, de su crítica, de sus primerísimos escritos. No sé. En realidad, no creo que lo vaya a leer prontamente. Lo que sí pensaba hasta la fecha, y prefería por sobre sus novelas, era la poesía que había leído del difunto. Y, más o menos en esa misma vibra, hoy el NYTimes publicó un poema, de un libro que aún no había salido. Se titula Requiem convenientemente. Aquí lo cuelgo:

It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE
This poem is taken from John Updike’s forthcoming collection, “Endpoint and Other Poems.”