Wages Of Past Time Poem by gershon hepner

Wages Of Past Time



Wages of past time,
like imperatives of sex,
unravel like weak rhyme,
compounded often with complex
interest in the past
increasing as it multiplies,
before the die is cast
and flesh before the spirit dies.


Inspired by Michiko Kakutani’s review of John Updike’s novel The Widows of Eastwick, a sequel to his 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick (“Old Black Magic is Old, and So Are These Witches, ” NYT, October 20,2008) :

John Updike once described his 1984 novel, “The Witches of Eastwick, ” as an attempt by him to “make things right with my, what shall we call them, feminist detractors, ” who complained, he said, that he tended to portray women as “wives, sex objects and purely domestic creatures.”…The passage of time seems to have mellowed the witches and their creator as well, and “The Widows of Eastwick, ” while deeply flawed, is a less tendentious, more emotionally credible work than its predecessor. Mr. Updike is less interested here in scoring didactic points against feminism than he is in exploring the wages of time and age shared by men and women alike, and there is an elegiac tone to the novel not dissimilar to that in the last Rabbit novel, “Rabbit at Rest” (1990) . The mood here reflects his characters’ realization that the past now weighs more than the future in the scale of their lives, and that the noisy imperatives of sex, which once got them in to so much trouble, have given way to whispered worries about bodily ailments and medical woes.

10/23/08

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