Appreciating Appreciation

"He sat with one arm up on the back of the seat beside him and smiled out toward the field, where the ground crew was unfurling the tarp across the foreshortened clay diamond and the outfield under the arc lights looked as brilliant and flat as a pool-table felt. And it flashed upon me, as I glimpsed this man sitting alone and unperturbed among the drained seats, that here was the happy man, the man of unceasing and effortless blessing."

    -- John Updike "Early Short Stories"

Nicholson Baker wrote a book about Updike ten years ago, determined to appreciate him while he was still alive:

Updike was much more important to me as a model and influence than Barthelme, and now the simple knowledge that he was alive and writing and had just published one of his best books, Self-Consciousness, felt like a piece of huge luck. How fortunate I was to be alive when he was alive!

How sweet Baker's effusive appreciation! I sometimes have had a glimmer of that, of the feeling of gladness for the gift of being a contemporary with someone. I felt it particularly with respect to William F. Buckley and Pope John Paul II.

Baker's comment reminds me of how easy it is to simply tear down and be negative, a constant temptation for this blogger. Updike wrote in "His Finest Hour":

This was more like George: he advanced his intellect negatively, by extending his contempt. All movies were lousy, all politicians were crooked, public education in America was the world's worst, most novels were a waste of time, everybody on television was out for your money.

I've always liked Updike in part because of his refreshing disregard for what others thought of him. How corrupting the parties and smart set and the literary world with its posturings and grandstanding and petty grievances - how noble and above the fray seemed Updike.

I liked also his defense of the gratuitousness, being gratuitous myself since only God is otherwise. Updike once had a character say that "a gift expected is not worth giving":

There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. Art, out of its own freedom, should excite and flatter our sense of our own. Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

Updike wasn't predictable, nor dependable in the quality of his novels but he was a gift. It's sad to think of a world without new Updike novels. I find it true, even in my lame journal writing that:

“Writing is a way of taming the world, turning the inchoate, often embarrassing stream into a package...[Writing] makes the world seem more real."