Reading Barth

I took down my old copy, a paperbound Torchbook read almost to pieces, its binding glue dried out and its margins marked again and again by the pencil of a young man who thought that here, definitively and forever, he had found the path, the voice, the style, and the method to save within himself and to present to others the Christian faith. Just glancing through these pages, I felt the superb iron of Barth’s paragraphs, his magnificent, seamless integrity and energy…

- John Updike, Roger’s Version : 33

 

Glimpses inside houses

trying to imagine, as he walks along, from the glimpses of books and lamps and knick-knacks that the curtained windows allow, the shape and taste of our lives, coveting our possessions before he passes out of the neighbourhood.

- John Updike, Roger’s Version : 31

 

Parties

…a party forces us to become many people, none of them entirely pleasant.

- John Updike, Roger’s Version

 

Again old fashionedly, I could not imagine two you…

Again old fashionedly, I could not imagine two young people of the opposite sex
locked in the same room and not copulating or at least laying hands on each
other’s sensitive places.

- John Updike, Roger’s Version, 89

 

The pattern here is the absolute pattern of every …

The pattern here is the absolute pattern of every high-school valedictory address: big questions melting into fatuous, wishful answers.

- John Updike, Roger’s Version, 138

 

Secret shame of reading theology

I have a secret shame: I always feel better – cleaner, revitalised – after reading theology, even poor theology, as it caresses and probes every crevice of the unknowable.

- John Updike, Roger’s Version 41

 

Reading theology

I have a secret shame: I always feel better – cleaner, revitalised – after reading theology, even poor theology, as it caresses and probes every crevice of the unknowable.

- John Updike, Roger’s Version : 33

 

Getting older

A spiritual fatigue descended upon me, a recognition that my life from now on was a matter of caretaking, of supervising my body like some feeble minded invalid kept alive by tubes and injections in a greedy nursing home, and that indeed it always had been such, that the flares of ambition and desire that had lit my way when I was younger and had given my life the drama of fiction or of a symbol-laden dream had been chemical devices, illusions with which the flesh and its percolating brain lured me along.

- John Updike, Roger’s Version : 225