John Updike.

The essential support and encouragement
comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your
society needs to know what only you can tell it.

John Updike died.

He embodied the post-war white American middle class and Protestant ideals which have defined part of this nation. I think to understand small fractions of the complex American perspective, you should understand this realist novelist, critic and poet.

On the Road

Those dutiful dogtrots down airport corridors

while gnawing at a Dunkin' Donuts cruller,

those hotel rooms where the TV remote

waits by the bed like a suicide pistol,

those hours in the air amid white shirts

whose wearers sleep-read through thick staid thrillers,

those breakfast buffets in prairie Marriotts—

such venues of transit grow dearer than home.

The tricycle in the hall, the wife's hasty kiss,

the dripping faucet and uncut lawn—this is life?

No, vita thrives via the road, in the laptop

whose silky screen shimmers like a dark queen's mirror,

in the polished shoe that signifies killer intent,

and in the solitary mission, a bumpy glide

down through the cloud cover to a single runway

at whose end a man just like you guards the Grail.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99910985


-----------------------------
Also, this is by far, one of my favorite music videos.