Assorted Prose by John Updike Page A

have, in effect, been given a clean slate. They are innocent of life, and the earth, which is so guilty of it, can feel a little safer, and a little lonelier.
    August 1964
    W E LOOKED FORWARD with avidity to the pictures of the moon sent back by Ranger VII, but now that they are in
Life
, between Lyndon Johnson and the Vanderbilts, we confess ourself disappointed. What didwe expect? Not, really, a gridwork of streets and the tops of little bald horned heads. But some message, some brief scrawl from God, a legible graffito on that invitingly blank and conspicuous surface. Instead, we got the same old pockmarks and smears we’d known were there all along: a riddled, wrinkled old celestial hide spattered with craters idiotically round and arbitrarily disposed. From four hundred and eighty miles away, the moon still has a semblance of terrain and wears a kind of face. At two hundred and thirty-five miles, the ridges and splotches are smoothing into a milky, speckled blandness. At eighty-five miles, the blandness is growing tasty, and the curdled circularity of the holes begins to remind us of—yes, the closer we get to the moon, the more it looks like cheese, presumably green.
Dinosaur Egg
    April 1958
    E ASTER WEEK made us think of (a) eggs and (b) how old we are getting, which two preoccupations naturally led us to a concern with the oldest egg in New York—a dinosaur egg a hundred and twenty million years old. This egg rests in that catch-all of the ages, the Museum of Natural History, whose Curator of Fossil Reptiles and Amphibians, Dr. Edwin H. Colbert, told us, “We acquired it in a trade with a little museum in southern France—Aix-en-Provence. They found quite a few of these eggs not far from the surface near the mouth of the Rhone. Harvard University has another. Dinosaurs made nests and deposited eggs in them, much as alligators and crocodiles do today. For some reason, these didn’t hatch. In time, they cracked, and the goo—the albumen and yolk—ran out, and mineral-bearing water and sand flowed in and solidified into rock.”
    A woman with harried hair and anxious eyes burst into the office where we were talking and exclaimed, “Dr. Colbert, there’s a man from Guatemala waiting downstairs with some strange bones he wants you to look at!”
    Dr. Colbert’s shell, unlike the egg’s, didn’t crack; he calmed the ladyand said to us, “While this egg is the oldest in the city, far older ones have been found. Our egg is Jurassic—that is, in the vicinity of a hundred million years old. The oldest existing vertebrate eggs were dug up in Texas and date from Permian times—about twice as long ago. They are at Harvard. We have some eggs from Mongolia that are Cretaceous. A few bits of what may be embryonic bone can be glimpsed in them. These are smaller than the Jurassic egg, and so are the Permian eggs. We don’t know what creature laid the Permian eggs; our Jurassic egg is pretty certainly from a sauropod dinosaur that was about forty feet long. The egg is twice the size of an ostrich egg, which, of course, is small in relation to the size of the parent. That’s how reptiles are; they lay many smallish eggs. Our egg is about as big as they come.”
    We thanked Dr. Colbert and went downstairs to look at this wonder. The egg sat alone in a glass case, thousands of miles and millions of years from Mother. She was pictured, in white ink, above her egg; she looked like a tadpole evenly mounted on four lumpy legs resembling an elephant’s. Her head was a mere cursory termination of a long and rather lovely neck. The expression in her eye was faint but earnest; she was probably not very bright, but good. Beneath the picture was written “
Hypselosaurus priscus
.” The egg was mostly a smooth yellowish-gray stone, much wider than it was high, like a partly deflated volley ball. The stone was cracked and chipped yet clearly ovoid. To sections of the surface clung curving flakes of the shell, its texture delicately