Value.

SAYING GOODBYE to VERY YOUNG CHILDREN

They will not be the same next time. The sayings

so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected.

Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in

the more securely to the worldly buzz

of television, alphabet, and street talk,

culture polluting their gazes’ dawn blue.

It makes you see at last the value of

those boring aunts and neighbors (their smells

of summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces

like shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves)

who knew you from the start, when you were zero,

cooing their nothings before you could be bored

or knew a name, not even you own, or how

this world, brave with hellos, turns all goodbye.

John Updike

Hopefully we can just remain squibs.

Hunter.

Ruskin, A Perspective Study of a Paper Crown, 1870

As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry.  Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness.

John Updike

Performer.

 Ruskin, Perspective Studies of a Paper Crown, 1870

As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry.  Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness.

John Updike

Floor.

What art offers is space -- a sort of breathing room for the spirit.

John Updike

Imagine the stories in that floor.

More.

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

John Updike