Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike Page B

that assumes all those who hold power are damned, that nothing is relative, that rhetoric is truth, that destruction is action, and that a holiday has been declared wherein we are all excused from learning our lessons. Goodness, effectiveness, and love live among particulars; hate feeds on sweeping categories.
    Line 21
. Doesn’t really do justice to the American accent. It is something, that accent, that happens between the throat and the heart, and has to do with bourbon, or heat, or talking to farm animals, or Jacobean pronunciation. Hearing across a London hotel lobby a silver-haired Texas businessman growl “My friend” to the fastidiously recoiling desk clerk, or eavesdropping on a bus while a pair of elderly female compatriots cackle and giggle together in their strange bubbling twang, or listening to a young American talk in that soft, rather cautious drawl (a drawl just as the American walk is, compared to the British strut, a prowl), I see those breezy big kitchens, and the lawns burnt brown by August, and the twirling sprinklers and fainting skies, and wonder at the cracked tender terrible confident emptiness of it all, and wonder how it happened so quickly, in two or three centuries, and think that we are the last new race, and that we are all inside the bus now, and there is nothing to do but ride out together the billion or so years before the sun swamps the planet.
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. Advice I have often given myself.
    * No sentence in this set of aging impressions seems farther away than this one now, when all Western governments are of glum economists.

AMOR VINCIT OMNIA AD NAUSEAM
(After Awakening from
Bruno’s Dream,
by Iris Murdoch, and Falling into the Nursery)
    “Hey diddle—?”
    “Diddle.”
    “You’re thinking about God again.”
    It was true. She had been. The cat had been thinking about the fiddle. She had been looking at him. He had a long stringy neck and a plump brown resinous hollow body. His voice had vibrato. She had been his mistress for four years. It had been ecstatic but not extremely. She was a small-boned calico with high tender ears and a broad subdivided brow and a moist nose and an abrasive triangular tongue the color of faded drapes. She had been attracted by his voice. They had met at a benefit concert being given for churchmice. A bow had scraped him and he had sung. The cat had gone up afterwards and had rubbed herself against him and in her whiskers, so decisively parallel, he had recognized something kindred. He had sung to her of Viennese woods and she had related to him tales of her previous lovers. There had been a succession of toms behind the Bromley gasworks. They had had terrible voices. They had clawed her. They had bitten. As the palms of a religious come to be indented by stigmata so the image slowly formed itself upon her mind of a hairless toothless lover, fragile and lean. He would have resonance. He would be powerless to pounce. Her telling the fiddle all this in those days had pleased and flattered them both. That had been in those days. These were these days. All day she took a small abrasive pleasure in lickingthe calico fur of her chest with her triangular tongue while he failed to sing but instead leaned in the corner and almost hummed. She looked at him, his shape, his texture, his state of tension. One of her toms had been made into a tennis racquet. Perhaps that had been the attraction. She thought, I need a larger fate, warmer, kinder, yet more perilous in its dimensions, coarsely infinite yet mottled like me. Her vertically slit eyes, hoarding depths of amber, dilated at a shadow from her barnyard days as a kitten in the straw in Surrey. Something large had often been above her. Something smelling of milk. It had mooed.
    The cow was in love with the moon. Throughout the first three quarters she had wept solidly, streams and streams. The moon had become full. Tears poured down her muzzle in an invincible tide.
    “You are seeking,” said the full moon,