Tag Archives: John Updike

Reading Updike’s surprisingly pornagraphic but nevertheless entrancing meditation on the futility of human life, Toward The End of Time, I was reminded of Mr. B.’s sandbox in the back forty. It was Updike’s passage on his main character’s futile attempt to build a dollhouse that did it. The sandbox, created of two-by-twelves and filled with several barrows-full of white sand, was rather more successful–being less ambitious to begin with. But Mr. B. has outgrown it and it sits out there covered with creepers, the sand become the home of several ant colonies, and begs to be removed. I’ll get around to it. Meanwhile, it is, as Updike says of the dollhouse effort, merely a reminder of relentless Nature. Our time is fleeting. The creepers and the ants are forever.