Somewhere Someone is Thinking About You

Once I read this piece by John Updike, I couldn't help but fall in love with the way he describes the girls. Sometimes readers skip over huge paragraphs of text just because it is boring and describes something insignificant. But I find beauty in text like that. The author puts so much effort into describing all of the senses he or she is experiencing and all of the the beauty or horror or other feeling that they are encountering. In those few pages that Updike wrote, I felt the yearning that Sammy felt. I felt the embarrassment that Queenie endured. At the end, I was even able to feel the same exact way Sammy would after he walked out and "felt how hard the world was going to be to [him] hereafter."

I have read a piece written by Henry Rollins that I thought of when I realized Sammy tried but did not get what he desired. He put all of this effort into explaining the girls but never was recognized by them after he "heroically" quit his job. Rollins also describes his muse in such detail that the reader can feel it and that sensation, no matter what it is, follows them for a little bit. The piece is:

Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have.

Even though I think he was trying to do something morally right, Sammy put himself under the bus by quitting his job. If the girls were unattractive, I think he might have not stood up to his boss and would have continued his monotonous job and mundane life as it was before. I'm not sure what Updike's purpose was for writing this piece, but I think he did put out a message, whether good or bad, of watching what and for whom you stand up.