Updike at rest.(Editor's Note)

In all the many elegant tributes to John Updike that appeared in the first days and weeks after his death in late January, I missed any mention of the thing that was troubling me most. Soon after he died I had said to a friend, half in jest, that I felt as if a minor god, who kept careful watch over all our doings, had gone away. That feeling, strange as it is, has only grown. It suggests, perhaps, that the role he played in our culture was not just that of a novelist who was alert to the ways and meanings of our time. Nor was he exactly, as he has been called, a man of letters, some distant figure who loomed above our cultural life, saying once and for all what's what. No, he was someone who simply paid steady attention, and steadily shared the fruits of that attention in his sterling and generally whimsical prose and verse. Novels, yes, short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, art criticism, but also light, hard-to-classify sketches, what might be called feuilletons, when he couldn't contain his observations in a more conventional form. One such sketch, published in The New Yorker in 1981, called "Invasion of the Book Envelopes," is a small comic meditation on the messy packaging in which books are shipped. The last piece of any sort to appear during his lifetime, which we had the honor to publish in our most recent issue, was another one of these. Called "Nessus at Noon," it is a brief witty dialogue between the owner of a dry cleaners and a customer who has received a puzzling note with an article of ...