John Updike - S

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Dear Dr. Podhoretz:

Just a note to bring you up to date on my dental adventures. I think I mentioned some months ago the sensitivity, an elusive "punky" feeling, in the lower-right quadrant. The molar-it was hard to know which it was, under the crowns-has been getting slowly worse, but not so bad that I couldn't ignore it, blaming it vaguely on the general nervous and spiritual stress I've been under recently, or even on the altitude here, which I imagined might function somewhat as an airplane ride does when it gives you an earache or a sensation of pressure in the sinuses. But lately the feeling ha s become unignorable, and I've come forty miles to a dentist here in Forrest, the town nearest the kibbutz-like community where I now reside.

But this dentist, a much more gracious and efficient practitioner than I had expected, with a definite English accent, of all things-the British seem strangely attracted to this part of the world, the opposite of their own dreary climate, I suppose-said that I didn't need a root canal but that the crown had been badly designed and was occluding in a way with the upper teeth that was applying torque arid giving me soreness along the gums- voiid, the "punky" feeling! Well, of course I defended your crown, said you were considered among the very best in Swampscott, etc. But with this tranquil little supercilious smile he had me bite on a piece of red wax-paper and grind my teeth and then did some very delicate drilling (I didn't even have Novocaine) and I must say the trouble seems miraculously to have vanished! And he only-charged me $45 for the appointment, as opposed to the $125 that you have been asking. But of course a lot of the things you buy here are cheaper than in the East, except for what has to be flown over the Rockies, like lobsters and cranberries.

Just thought you'd like to keep abreast of my mouth and make a mark on my chart. You have several sets of X-rays; perhaps you can tell from them whatever it was you did wrong.

Happy Veterans Day,

Sarah Worth

Gentlemen:

Enclosed find endorsed checks totalling $157,634.26 to be deposited to my charge account with your book and gift shop. I look forward to visiting Samana Cay some day and using my accumulated credit to make some purchases and enjoy some leisure there.

Yours sincerely,

Sarah P. Worth

le 12 novembre

Monsieur,

Voici les formules et les renseignements nécessaires à ouvrir mon compte, et aussi un cheque, tiré de mon compte à la Bank of Boston, pour $200,000. Faites-ia mon premier dépot, s'il vous plait, et

Agréez, je vous prie,

l'expression de mes sentiments dévoués,

#4723-9001-7469-8666

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Enright-

We have been slow to respond to your several communications not because we have been taking them lightly but perhaps taking them all too seriously. Over the years a considerable number of properly concerned and loving parents have written us, threatened us, and even appeared at our gates with complaints such as yours; we are often besieged by lawyers and psychiatric "experts" and prejudiced journalists over these issues of "brainwashing" and "child abduction." Never mind that the "child" was as old as thirty-four in one case, and in almost all cases well above the legal age of consent. Never mind that "brainwashing" is a nebulous term that could with justice be applied to our elementary-school introduction to the history and the capitalist, "freedom-loving" values of the United States; or to the religious rubrics pressed upon the child not only by church, synagogue, and mosque but by home influence and certain sentimental strains of popular entertainment; or to the massive inculcation of consumeristic hedonism sought by the relentless barrage of television commercials and printed advertising. Not to mention the habituation to violence and vice that follows from even modest exposure to the televised dramas 'sandwiched between the insidious commercials; and the absolutely pervasive and irresistible rape of adolescent minds by the nihilism and eroticism of popular music; and the more specialized forms of brainwashing undergone in military and corporate indoctrination programs.

Our brains are there to be washed, Mr. and Mrs. Enright, by everything from elevator music to bumper stickers, and amid this polluted tide of bobbing, jostling, oozing propaganda a few souls elect to discipline their egos and follow the Master. Our way is not easy. Many fall away when they realize that the death of ego is the price of happiness. Many desert when they discover that cherished possessions must be sacrificed to non-attachment. Many have lately defected, rather than face the true richness of paradox which the Master has prepared for them. Openness and spontaneity are our watchwords, not control. Your son Kevin, or Yajna as we call him here, came to us freely and is free to leave. Though appreciative of all you have done for him, from nursery school to business school, he does not want to return to your big sandstone house in Saint Louis with the mansard roof and porte-cochere, on its archaic private street, though he thinks back upon it fondly, as we all should upon scenes we have outgrown. He is not brainwashed. He is adult, and at peace, and on the road to nirvana.

Look into your own hearts. Our Master advises you to consider this text from the blessed Dhammapada: "'These are my sons. This is my wealth.' In this way the fool troubles himself. He is not even the owner of himself: how much less of his sons and of his wealth." In demanding we return "your" son to you, you become "fools." A semantic misunderstanding lies at the heart of your confusion: when we speak of "our" or "my" son or daughter or wife or master, we are not expressing ownership but by a grammatical shortcut a certain intuitively felt connection: these persons or manifestations of enduring modalities have wandered into "my" sphere of apprehension, the possessive pronoun being used merely to locate the subjectivity. But people do not own people. Your son is not "yours" even though you carried him in your womb and paid for his extensive education, frat fees, auto insurance, etc. Though for a time he was "yours" to imprison within your Richardsonian mansion and perhaps to bully and beat and certainly to manipulate with the psychological blackmail at which the nuclear family is so adept, he is not "yours" now, to reflect creditably upon you in the eyes of your equally narrow-minded and proprietorial acquaintances, or to reverse the declining trend in the railroad enterprises that made your family fortune^ or to extend your genes and generations further into the void of maya; he is, instead, "his"-or, to put it more exactly, his ego or aham is at the service of his highest self, the atman, as it merges with purusha, the changeless and featureless spirit which at the beginning of phenomena allowed itself to be clouded with the emergence of matter and its complicated turbulences.

To make "your" son truly "yours," come join him and us in this besieged place of pilgrimage and study, or, if-you are too deeply mired in the illusory-too "brainwashed," so to speak-come join us in the sense, of making a generous gift to the work of the ashram, in the form either of a direct cash donation (in this last year of the full 50% tax bracket) or a gift of stocks, bonds, or property.

Most sincerely,

Ma Prem Kundalini

Executive Assistant to

Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.,

Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

Oh my darling dearest Pearl, my only child-

How could you do so many vile things to your mother at once?

(1) You turned twenty-one-for this I cannot exactly blame you, though it means I have not even a vestige of a child now. I trust you received the sandalwood mala with the tinted miniature of the Arhat and the quite expensive snakeskin sandals that I sent off a month ago to make their way across the desert, the mountains, the plains, our good green East, and the blue Atlantic Ocean to you\ you didn't thank me in your otherwise news-laden letter. The snake is the Arizona coral snake, which has this remarkable alternation of broad red/ narrow yellow/broad black/narrow yellow/broad red etc. stripes, all so mechanically perfect it looks a little cheap and plasticky-one of those natural effects too good to be true. The snake itself is rather rare and shy and small (which makes the sandals both expensive and illegal) and highly poisonous, and has-all this from Alinga, who seems to have made quite a study of desert life in her years here-an endearing trick of, when threatened, hiding its head in its coils and lifting its tail and popping out its anus! That makes a distinct and alarming sound, she says. Really, prakriti is just so irreverent-it's all lila, as the Master often reminds us. (2) You say you are not only taking the fall term off but may likely never come back to Yale and finish your degree. I can't tell you how much of an utter mistake this is. Your doubts about your major-whether or not this M. Derrida and his deconstruction are actually anti-phallic and whether or not this Mr. Bloom twiddles too much when he lectures-are really beside the point; you can major in chemistry or basket weaving or home economics (which used to be a course seriously offered to young women-how to sew and cook, mostly-wifemanship with sex left out) for all I care, but you must get your degree. If you don't you can never hold your head up; a college degree is the invisible tiara a woman must wear now, otherwise people write her off as a bumpkin, an ignoramus, a throwback, an archaic creature. Look at Princess Diana, how people snicker even at her. Look at me, whose greatest mistake in life was to leave Radcliffe at the outset of my junior year to marry your father- bow I secretly suffered all these years, how I cringed whenever the subject of colleges came up in conversation. I vowed you would never make my mistake. Well, you did get through one more year than I did. So close! You say that in Europe it really doesn't matter so much and if so that proves my point that Europeans are at bottom grotesquely primitive cavepeople who believe that everything comes down to entitlement by birth. The ones who stayed there chose to hang back from the great spiritual adventure America was and is and I fear I can't bear to think of my Pearl wasting her precious life among them. The Europeans here at the ashram, most of whom have been deported or gone into hiding, were a fascinating study in how intelligent and attractive people could go through all the correct motions and yet all the time be missing the point. They kept trying to make a formal church or a military organization out of it all; the delicacy of our American reality keeps escaping them, the way our whole lovely nation is founded on the edge of a dream, on the edge of purusha. I don't include the Arhat; he is not European but Indian, an Aryan with something else added-sun, centuries of terribly much sun, and also something religious from the Dravidian South, with its murderous worship of femaleness, like a wonderful gluey dark honey poured into milk. Jan sounds totally milky to me, and his parents too, though they've curdled into butter-little square pats stamped with some phony armorial seal. Darling, believe me, not going through with Yale, however much of an awkward bother it seems now, will destroy your life-you'll limp forever, my dear tall-striding beauty.