A Month of Sundays by John Updike.
Title: A Month of Sundays.
Author: John Updike.
Genre: Fiction, literature, satire, religion, romance, epistolary fiction, diary.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1975.
Summary: In this antic riff on Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, the Reverend Tom Marshfield, a latter-day Arthur Dimmesdale, is sent west from his Midwestern parish in sexual disgrace. At a desert retreat dedicated to rest, recreation, and spiritual renewal, this fortyish serial fornicator is required to keep a journal whose 31 weekly entries constitute the book. In his wonderfully overwrought style he lays bare his soul and his past - his marriage to the daughter of his ethics professor, his affair with his organist, his antipathetic conversations with his senile father and his bisexual curate, his golf scores, his poker hands, his Biblical exegeses, and his smoldering desire for the directress of the retreat, the impregnable Ms. Prynne.
My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:
♥ I have never knowingly failed to honor the supreme, the hidden commandment, which is, Take the Natural World, O Creature Fashioned in Parody of My Own, and Reconvert its Stuff to Spirit; Take Pleasure and Make of it Pain; Chastise Innocence though it Reside within the Gaps of the Atom; Suspect Each Moment, for it is a Thief, Tiptoeing Away with More than it Brings; Question all Questions; Doubt all Doubts; Despise all Precepts which Take their Measure from Man; Remember Me.
♥ Yet I could hear, in the gaps between the crackling thunder of my feet and the ponderous surf of my breathing, voices - or, if not quite voices, then the faint rubbed spot on the surface of silence that indicates where voices have been erased.
♥ In general the churches, visited by me too often on weekdays - when the custodian was moving the communion table about like a packing case, and sweeping up the chewing-gum wrappers that insolently spangled the sacrosanct reaches of the choir - bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola: they promoted thirst without quenching it.
♥ “There’s such a thing as feeling,” I told her.
“And such a thing as feigning,” she responded.
♥ Precisely, I worshipped her, adored her flaws as furiously as her perfections, for they were hers; and thus I attained, in the bound of a few spring weeks, a few illicit lays, the attitude which saints bear toward God, and which I in a Christ’s lifetime of trying (40 [present age] minus 7 [age of reason] equals 33) had failed to reach, that is, of forgiving Him the pain of infants, the inexorability of disease, the wantonness of fortune, the billions of fossilized deaths, the helplessness of the young, the idiocy of the old, the craftsmanship of torturers, the authority of blunderers, the savagery of accident, the unbreathability of water, and all the other repulsive flecks on the face of Creation.
♥ And what is marriage, that supposedly seamless circle, but a deep well up out of which the man and the woman stare at the impossible sun, the distant bright disc, of freedom?
♥ Wherein does the modern American man recover his sense of worth, not as dogged breadwinner and economic integer, but as romantic minister and phallic knight, as personage, embodiment, and hero? In adultery. And wherein does the American woman, coded into mindlessness by household slavery and the stupefying companionship of greedy infants, recover her powers of decision, of daring, of discrimination - her dignity, in short? In adultery. The adulterous man and woman arrive at the place of their tryst stripped of all the false uniforms society has assigned them; they come on no recommendation but their own, possess no credentials but those God has bestowed, that is, insatiable egos and workable genitals. They meet in love, for love, with love; they tremble in a glory that is unpolluted by the wisdom of this world; they are, truly, children of light. Those of you - you whose faces stare mutely up at me as I writhe within this imaginary pulpit - those of you who have shaken off your sleep and committed adultery, will in your hearts acknowledge the truth of my characterization.
♥ industrious: in dust try us
♥ Graham Greene is right. Gratitude is the way He gets us, when we have gnawed off a leg to escape His other snares.
♥ She is beautiful in oblivion. I envy her. She has the style of Grace is not its content. Her goodness keeps defeating me. My hate of her, my love of her, meet at the bottom of our rainbow, a circle.
♥ Idea for a funny sermon (funny idea for a sermon?): The Case of the Empty Tomb, solved by an eccentric fat detective, fat, gruff, uncanny, cleanliness-obsessed Ponto Pilato. Who, really, were those two “angels”? Why did Mary mistaken Him for a gardener? Was there a “second Osworld”? Et cet.
♥ “It’s hard,” I told her.
“It is,” she said, soft center of my new world.
♥ Ned began, “Simple compassion--”
“Compassion is not simple. That is where you so heretically condescend. You give your simple compassion to those you imagine to be simple. Love thy neighbor. Love what is near, not what is far. Love the rich, the well
off, the white; love the poor suburban burgher who drags in here because he simply senses another feeble ally in his perilous battle to keep from thieves what other thieves have won for him. If this society strikes you as criminal, remember the criminal on the cross. Forget for a moment this Moloch of social change, and pray to the true God, the God above change, the God who destroyed Rome and Christendom, the God who jealously reserves to His own kingdom the new Jerusalem of perfect equality and justice - pray to Him that, your penitential term with me completed, you may be called to a slum parish, and there sharpen your compassion on another grindstone of circumstance. At all points, Ned, the world presses us toward despair and forgetfulness of God. At no point, perhaps, more than here, in this empty church.”
♥ … being far makes these souls, once neighbors of mine, more dear. I hear now, what the roaring of desire and dread in my ears deafened me to at the time, that they each wanted, expected, something from me, from me. In their midst I was powerful. And felt helpless. Here, in this desert routine, I am stripped and anonymous, and feel mighty. The splendor of space and the splendid waste of time enter my self-negation. See Saints, Lives of.
♥ My porch. My door. My stairs. Again the staircase rose before me, shadow-stripped, to suggest the great brown back of a slave; this time the presentiment so forcibly suggested to me my own captivity, within a God I mocked, within a life I abhorred, within a cavernous unnameable sense of misplacement and wrongdoing, that I dragged a body heavy as if wrapped in chains step by step upward.
♥ It was the new rich versus the old rich, and the new rich saw what the old rich didn’t, e.g., freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.
♥ Irony is the style of our cowardice.
♥ She had seen we were a pair, but had taken us for a salt and pepper shaker, not the matched jaws of a heartbreaker.
♥ And what a fine judgement, by the way, this is of our vaunted American religiosity! From the first Thanksgiving, ours is the piety of the full belly; we pray with our stomachs, while our hands do mischief, and our heads indict the universe.
♥ And are we not moved, now as then, to rise up, and thrust Him out of the city, and lead Him to the brow of the hill, that we might cast Him down headlong, so that He might taste, with us - us the drowning man, the starving man, the falling man - might taste the implacability of natural laws that do not suspend an atom of their workings however huge and absolute the cry of our appalled spirits?
And, now as then, He passes through our midst invisible, ungraspable, and goes His way.
For His way is not ours.
The hard lesson is borne in upon us, alleviation is not the purpose of His miracles, but demonstration. Their randomness is not their defect, but their essence, as injustice (from our point of view, which is that of children) is essential to a Creation of differentiated particulars. In the primal partition of darkness from light, the potential for better and worse was born, and with it the possibility of envy and pain, process and loss, sin and time. He came not to revoke the Law and Ground of our condition but to demonstrate a Law and Ground beyond.
♥ Stephen, on the other hand, so long bullied into a passive goodness, and for too many years of his life angelic-looking, with his baby complexion and long-lashed eyes, has a backlog of temptations he is anxious to adjust. His inwardness will welcome drugs; his beauty will attract girls; and his years of absorbing abuse will excuse him, I fear, from guilt. This meek one is prepared to inherit the earth.
♥ Heredity, it occurs to me, works up as well as down. The creatine of golfing passion did not begin shooting in my muscles until i had an athlete for a son. Nor did I become a lover until my second son proved beautiful. A jabber and a taker, a Spartan and a Sybarite: the trunk stands declared in its forking.
♥ … and the universe can be slain. But the universe is a dragon, as a glance upward into a clear night sky will show.
♥ Babies and guilt, women are built for lugging.
♥ A dime held close to the eye eclipses the sun. No matter in how many ways our lives are demonstrated to be insignificant, we can only live them as if they were not.
♥ I have been thinking a lot about love, these days, my hatred of the word, my constant recurrence to it, and it occurs to me, one of insomnia’s perishable revelations, that before we love something we must make a kind of replica of it, a memory-body of glimpses and moments, which then replaces its external, rather drab existence with a constellatory internalization, oversimplified and highly portable and in the end impervious to reality’s crude strip-mining.
♥ I had brushed up against a terrible truth: it’s the sure shots that do us in.
♥ What is a masochist but a sadist whom weakness confines to empathetic satisfactions?
♥ I know them; one cannot know and not love. In this sense the Greeks were not so naive, in supposing that to know the good was to do the good.
♥ What interests us is not the good but the godly. Not living well but living forever.
♥ So we learn to say nothing as a way of saying it all.
♥ Alicia, I see now, was like those brimming golden afternoons of boyhood, that yet we do not wish to live again, because we do not wish to be again the pint-size, allergy-ridden, powerless person who enjoyed them.
♥ Oh, I moved through you, understanding all this and more, and it came to me that love is not an e-motion, an assertive putting out, but a trans-motion, a compliant moving through.