Free Assorted Prose by John Updike Page B

Puritanism of a whalebone swift, which expanded, with mathematical flexibility, at a touch.
    The Carlebach Gallery has established a display of Burmese, Chinese, French, and Hindu chess sets. Rooks were, variously, pagodas, castles, and howdah-heavy elephants. My Sister and I, Stein Specialists, had assembled vessels of wood, china, silver, brass, and opaline, in the shapes of skulls, roosters, monkeys, monks, Bismarck, nuns, foxes, George Washington, slaves, fops, Churchill, and a woman’s bare legs. In one nook were some old maps of the American Northeast, with strange nations like Pensylvania, Nova Jersey, Nova York, and Pars Aouanushionigy squeezed in between the Atlantic and Lake Ontario. In another, the Sons of the American Revolution had arranged George Washington’s sugar-loaf crusher, bleeding knives, fob seal, telescope, dress sword, sextant, and shoe-measuring scale for our edification, along with Martha Washington’s lace needle and formal slippers. She had tiny feet. Speaking of feet, there was the Joseph Burger collection of footwear, which proved that the poorer the wearer, the more sensible the shoe. The Mexican peasant’s leather sandals, the Chinese coolie’s “bird’s-nest” boots, and the Norwegian yeoman’s woven shoes set a norm of comfort and simplicity from which sophistication could only depart, tweaking the toes upward (Turkey and Syria), adding square flaps to the front (Bohemia), piling on width (dunderbludgeons, popular under Henry VIII), adding height (Japanese clogs), and, in a frenzy of civilization, withering the foot itself into a pitiful flipper that could fit into a five-inch envelope of flowered cloth (China).
    Our own feet began to ache. We hastily glanced at a Bible owned,each in his time, by Charles I and Benjamin Franklin; at aboriginal vacuum cleaners, their sucking action created by metal pumps (1905), scissor bellows (1907), and accordion bellows (1911); and at the American Museum of Photography’s array of stereoscopes, crystallotypes, graphascopes, daguerreotypes, melainotypes, ambrotypes, and ferrotypes. On the way out, we experimentally opened what we took to be a fancy toothpick holder. Inside, there was a miniature button-hook for a baby’s shoes. How precious. How old.
Spatial Remarks
    November 1957
    L AST WEEK we passed several anxious days tending the man in the moon, for whom previously we had never much cared. “The moon,” a third-grade teacher once told us brusquely, “is a stone. A mammoth stone.” That seemed to sum it up. Debunked as a deity, stripped of its authority to cause madness and promote crops, nervously plucking at the tides like an old pensioner perpetually adjusting a blanket, the satellite (to use the word in its primitive sense) was a heavenly deadhead. Yet when we read that the Russians might celebrate their birthday party by splashing a red stain across a breadth of lunar craters, it could have been our own face they were planning to spatter with ink, so great was our indignation, alarm, and shame.
    The rumor seemed plausible enough. The handy phrase “Red Moon” had been bouncing through the headlines for the past month. And any man or bear intent on showing off his muscles will go for the biggest rock he sees. On the night before the day that in Russia would mark the ruby anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, we were in a country house, so the sky was much with us. It had cleared for the first time in November; the moon was brilliant and a hair less than full. The pure and venerable disc, tastefully touched with shadows named by the homely astronomy of a more deferential time Aristotle, Plato, Copernicus, Newton, Hell, Beer, and Mare Serenetatis, suddenly seemed precious, like one coin wehad saved never to spend. Bidding the moon good night, we wondered in what shape it would rise again—with one cheek meretriciously rouged, or perhaps with the entire head split in two by a festive cobalt bomb or even fragmented into a cloud of