Word: humanism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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INSTEAD UPDIKE plunges us into a scrutiny of the alienated characters. In "Love Song for a Moog Synthesizer," for instance, he binds us in the "spirals of indignation" of a Cub Scout den mother. Throughout the collection of short stories, Updike stalks the problem of human disconnectedness from all imaginable angles, realistically fleshing it out in "Domestic Life in America," abstracting it in his geometric "Problems," sketching a symbolic outline in the opening piece, "Commercial," recasting it as classical tragedy in "Augustine's Concubine." But he refuses to hunt out the solutions in the diseased scenarios. His "maimed and fanatic...
Only under the worst conditions does Updike envision that men can begin to dismantle the obstacles between them. Pain alone links Tod and his wife. Pumpkin, in "Love Song for a Moog Synthesizer." Tod responds to Pumpkin's need for human sympathy only when she offers a "piece of herself, transferred to his ribs, his kidneys, as pain." Love attaches itself only "to what we cannot help," Updike observes grimly. In another tale of marital wrangling, then, the wife gets through to her husband only by inducing desperation like a "hooked claw," evolving "psychic protuberances that penetrated and embraced...
...time Updike has come to his final take, "Atlantises," the need for him to take a stand, to interfere in the stricken human landscape, to rip out his earplugs, is excruciating. But Updike settles for the absurdist message of ex-family man Mr. Farnham. As he speeds down the Connecticut highway he spys a huge gray tower, used for training submarine operators how to escape from their sunken vessel by blowing oxygen out of their lungs. The image is as oppressive as the tower is tall. Worse, though, Mr. Farnham is moved by the tower's presence to utter homage...
...oppose abortion just as I oppose killing people generally; the potential of a human being, to appreciate the world and freely respond to it awes me. Since I oppose killing people, the task of explaining why I am against killing very young people strikes me as conceding something before I begin: that there is a relevant distinction between a fetus and a newborn, or between a newborn and an adult...
...argument over abortions really centers on whether we are sure that a fetus is human. There is no totally satisfactory answer to this. But does the burdon of proof rest on pro-lifers at all? To say that abortion is all right until somebody proves the humanity of the unborn is like saying that it is okay to do test bombing in an area, so long as there might not be people there. The area might be desert, it might be a city of 1.5 million people-- how can it be enough to say that abortion might not be violent...