John Updike RIP

To acknowledge the passing of John Updike, below is the end of his early story "Pigeon Feathers." In it is evidence both of Updike's training as a painter and his Christian faith. But like Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor, there was nothing lazy about Updike's faith—he had little sympathy with Pat Robertson and his ilk.

Updike's control of the English language was extraordinary. Apparently many people are tone deaf to such music—I guess you either get it or you don't. Me, I feel lucky every time I get to read a passage like the one below.

The teenaged David is burying the birds he has shot:

"He had never seen a bird this close before. The feathers were more wonderful than dog's hair, for each filament was shaped within the shape of the feather, and the feathers in turn were trimmed to fit a pattern that flowed without error across the bird's body. He lost himself in the geometrical tides as the feathers now broadened and stiffened to make an edge for flight, now softened and constricted to cup warmth around the mute flesh. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him. Yet these birds bred in the millions and were exterminated as pests. Into the fragrant open earth he dropped one broadly banded in slate shades of blue, and on top of it another, mottled all over in rhythms of lilac and gray. The next was almost wholly white, but for a salmon glaze at its throat. As he fitted the last two, still pliant, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever."