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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
John Updike died earlier today. A prolific and celebrated author, critic, and essayist, his most comfortable setting was the uneasy leisure and disullusionment of the American middle-class suburb.
Personally, the essay that will always resonate with me is “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”, his 1960 New Yorker article describing the final afternoon of Ted Williams’ playing career. It’s a fitting read as the sun sets on Updike himself:
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.
