Assorted Prose by John Updike

pastures.” While I cannot feel that his advice was always in the best interests of my family, he was by his own lights successful and must be admired for it. History has been created by just this type of personality.
    I have been called, among many other things, an optimist.
    I do not think of myself as a optimist or a pessimist but as a normal human individual blessed with 100% excellent physical health since the day of my creation. At the time, a certain number of angels whom I do not wish to name doubted my ability to serve as First Man. I showed them that they were wrong. It is my sincere belief that any healthy man, placed in that position, could have done the job.
    Though there is a lot wrong with the state of the world as we know it, I think entirely too much is made of the Fall. Eden just could not have accommodated all the men and women who now enjoy the blessings, qualified though they are in some instances, of earthly life. I lived in Eden many years and I flatter myself that I know more about its dimensions than most of the theological journals I make it my habit to read. These are written by good men, but their morbid preoccupation with Original Sin rubs me the wrong way, though I don’t mind in the least whatever they say about me. I have no regrets. And I recommend that you have none either.

First Person Plural

Central Park
    March 1956
    O N THE AFTERNOON of the first day of spring, when the gutters were still heaped high with Monday’s snow but the sky itself was swept clean, we put on our galoshes and walked up the sunny side of Fifth Avenue to Central Park. There we saw:
    Great black rocks emerging from the melting drifts, their craggy skins glistening like the backs of resurrected brontosaurs.
    A pigeon on the half-frozen pond strutting to the edge of the ice and looking a duck in the face.
    A policeman getting his shoe wet testing the ice.
    Three elderly relatives trying to coax a little boy to accompany his father on a sled ride down a short but steep slope. After much balking, the boy did, and, sure enough, the sled tipped over and the father got his collar full of snow. Everybody laughed except the boy, who sniffled.
    Four boys in black leather jackets throwing snowballs at each other. (The snow was ideally soggy, and packed hard with one squeeze.)
    Seven men without hats.
    Twelve snowmen, none of them intact.
    Two men listening to the radio in a car parked outside the Zoo; Mel Allen was broadcasting the Yanks–Cardinals game from St. Petersburg.
    A tahr (
Hemitragus jemlaicus
) pleasantly squinting in the sunlight.
    An aoudad absently pawing the mud and chewing.
    A yak with its back turned.
    Empty cages labelled “Coati,” “Orang-outang,” “Ocelot.”
    A father saying to his little boy, who was annoyed almost to tears bythe inactivity of the seals, “Father [Father Seal, we assumed] is very tired; he worked hard all day.”
    Most of the cafeteria’s out-of-doors tables occupied.
    A pretty girl in black pants falling on them at the Wollman Memorial Rink.
    “ BILL & DORIS ” carved on a tree. “ REX & RITA ” written in the snow.
    Two old men playing, and six supervising, a checkers game.
    The Michael Friedsam Foundation Merry-Go-Round, nearly empty of children but overflowing with calliope music.
    A man on a bench near the carrousel reading, through sunglasses, a book on economics.
    Crews of shinglers repairing the roof of the Tavern-on-the-Green.
    A woman dropping a camera she was trying to load, the film unrolling in the slush and exposing itself.
    A little colored boy in aviator goggles rubbing his ears and saying, “He really hurt me.” “No, he didn’t,” his nursemaid told him.
    The green head of Giuseppe Mazzini staring across the white softball field, unblinking, though the sun was in its eyes.
    Water murmuring down walks and rocks and steps. A grown man trying to block one rivulet with snow.
    Things like brown sticks nosing through a plot of cleared soil.
    A tire track in