Rabbit, Run

by John Updike

You climb up through the little grades and then get to the top and everybody cheers; with the sweat in your eyebrows you can’t see very well and the noise swirls around you and lifts you up, and then you’re out, not forgotten at first, just out, and it feels good and cool and free. You’re out, and sort of melt, and keep lifting, until you become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town, a piece that for some queer reason has clouded and visited them. They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.

“The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you’re going before you go there.”

He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

“If you have the guts to be yourself,” he says, “other people’ll pay your price.”

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t – whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

Sleep this night is not a dark haunted domain the mind must consciously set itself to invade, but a cave inside himself, into which he shrinks while the claws of the bear rattle like rain outside.

Though he’s lying there alone he feels crowded, all these people troubling about him not so much their faces or words as their mute dense presences, pushing in the dark like crags under water