‘The world as given’

"On Decoration Day" (the earlier name of Memorial Day) political cartoon c. 1900 by John T. McCutcheon. Caption: "You bet I'm goin' to be a soldier, too, like my Uncle David, when I grow up."

“To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.”

―John Updike (1932-2009), American novelist, short-story writer, essayist and literary and art critic. He spent most of his life on the Massachusetts North Shore.

'The world as given'

John Updike in 1986

“To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.’’

— John Updike (1932-2009), in Self-Consciousness, a memoir. Updike was a celebrated novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic and literary critic. Raised in Pennsylvania, he spent most of his life on the Massachusetts North Shore, including Ipswich, Georgetown andfor his last 30 years, in very affluent Beverly Farms. He came to be considered America’s leading man of letters.

— By Sswonk

'Before the merciless grid'

"Predating the merciless grid that seized Manhattan and possessed the vast Midwest, New England towns have at their center an irregular heart of open grass, vestige of the Puritan common, holding, perhaps, a village pump, a weathered monument, a surviving elm. In Rowley {Mass.}, a vacant triangle beside Route 1A that a December narrows becomes suddenly alive with whirling dervishes of Christmas lights….''

By the late John Updike from his essay "Common Land,'' in Arthur Griffin's New England: The Four Seasons