Word: ritual
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...group of like-minded couples whom the older Ipswichers call the Junior Jet Set. Updike has organized endless basketball, volleyball and touch-football games, led the jet set on skiing trips, and presided over countless intramural parties. Says one member of the set: "What we have evolved is a ritual. It sets up a rhythm where we are all available to each other. It's rather as if all of us belong to a family." Adds another friend without elaboration: "You can't sustain that very long without its being very destructive...
...Ritual. Freddy's dirty truths and Piet's butterfly adulteries converge with the arrival in Tarbox of Foxy Whitman and her husband Ken, a biochemist preoccupied with his own second-rateness. Alone of the women, Foxy seems unafraid of what Freddy calls "the smell and hurt of love"; seven years of childless boredom with Ken have made her vulnerable. Now, though she is pregnant, she and Piet Hanema fall in love, an old-fashioned and banal assertion of life that brings down on them and the tribe the old-fashioned and banal tribulations of middle-class guilt, entrapment...
...rest of the ritual plays itself out almost mechanically: Foxy's fetus is aborted, the Whitmans and the Hanemas get divorced, Piet and Foxy marry and move away. The remaining couples take up bridge, their place in the town having been quietly usurped by a younger crowd that "held play readings, and kept sex in its place, and experimented with LSD." Toward the end, Updike provides a fortissimo blast of obvious symbolism: the Congregational Church goes up in an apocalyptic fire that leaves untouched only the old tin weathercock, riding high over the gutted house...
There was the customary international flavor to this year's ceremony. Pope Paul chose twelve students from the underdeveloped "third world," at tending Rome's Pontifical Urban University, to share in the ritual. One seminarian was from North Viet Nam, another from South Korea; four were Africans. Afterward, in a ten-minute sermon, the Pope spoke of the universal need for fraternity. "A new current of love must turn enemies into friends, strangers into brothers," he said. "Love is still shrunken and confined in side borders of customs, interests and selfishness which must be widened. Love...
...Agnon half-concludes, "is defined as a being that moves." In the end, the guest returns to Palestine, but with a kind of sad hesitancy. For in Agnon there is no confident resolution between the perfect closed circle of ancient ritual and the improvised present tense of life...