QUILT

A Patriotic Lullaby

The quilt that covers all of us, to date,
Has patches numbered 1 to 48,
Five northern rents, a crooked central seam,
A ragged eastern edge, a way
Of bunching uglily and a
Perhaps too energetic color scheme.
Though shaken every twenty years, this fine
Old quilt was never beaten on the line.
It took long making. Generations passed
While thread was sought, and calico
And silk was coaxed from Mexico
And France. The biggest squares were added last.
Don't kick your covers, son. The bed is built
So you can never shake the clinging quilt
That blanketed your birth and tries to keep
Your waking warm, impalpable
As atmosphere. As earth it shall
Be tucked about you through your longest sleep.


-- John Updike, The New Yorker, 16 November 1957, p. 54.

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* * * THE READING ROOM * * *


Intellectual Alpinist Fails to Encounter Deity

"The tips of my fingers just reached their aim, but only touched without anchoring themselves. As I fell back, my foot missed its former support, and my whole weight came down on the feeble left hand. The clutch was instantaneously torn apart, and I was falling through the air. The old flash of surprise crossed my mind, tempered by something like a sense of relief. All was over. The mountains sprang up with a bound ... "

-- Leslie Stephen, A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps, from "Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking" (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1873)