I Used to Like You Until...: (How Binary Thinking Divides Us)

by Kat Timpf

John Updike, was able to write such perfect little passages in his Rabbit novels that many of them have stuck with me my entire life. (Yeah, that bit about hate as a shelter isn’t the only one that’s stuck with me; there are so many: “We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.” “How can you respect the world when you see it’s being run by a bunch of kids turned old?” “It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.” “Rabbit realized the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money.” “We are cruel enough without meaning to be.” “You can’t trust anybody not to fuck.” And then there’s the one that made me sob over and over again after my mom died: “What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.” Ouch.)