THURSDAY MORNING IN A NEW YORK SUBWAY STATION

Love! Attar of libido in the air! It is 8:45 a.m. Thursday morning in the IRT subway station at 50th Street and Broadway and already two kids are hung up in a kind of herringbone weave of arms and legs, which proves, one has to admit, that love is not confined to Sunday in New York. Still, the odds! All the faces come popping in clots out of the Seventh Avenue local, past the King Size Ice Cream machine, and the turnstiles start whacking away as if the world were breaking up on the reefs. Four steps past the turnstiles everybody is already backed up haunch to paunch for the climb up the ramp and the stairs to the surface, a great funnel of flesh, wool, felt, leather, rubber and steaming alumicron, with the blood squeezing through everybody's old sclerotic arteries in hopped-up spurts from too much coffee and the effort of surfacing from the subway at the rush hour. Yet there on the landing are a boy and a girl, both about eighteen, in one of those utter, My Sin, backbreaking embraces.

He envelops her not only with his arms but with his chest, which has the American teen-ager concave shape to it. She has her head cocked at a 90-degree angle and they both have their eyes pressed shut for all they are worth and some incredibly feverish action going with each other's mouths. All round them, ten, scores, it seems like hundreds, of faces and bodies are perspiring, trooping and bellying up the stairs with atherosclerotic grimaces past a showcase full of such novel items as loy Buzzers, Squirting Nickels, Finger Rats, Scary Tarantulas and spoons with realistic dead flies on them, past Fred's barbershop, which is just off the landing and has glossy photographs of young men with the kind of baroque haircuts one can get in there, and up onto 50th Street into a madhouse of traffic and shops with weird lingerie and gray hair-dyeing displays in the windows, signs for free teacup readings and a pool-playing match between the Playboy Bunnies and

Downey's Showgirls, and then everybody pounds on toward _the Time-Life Building, the Brill Building or NBC.

The boy and the girl just keep on writhing in their embroilment. Her hand is sliding up the back of his neck, which he turns when her fingers wander into the intricate formal gardens of his Chicago Boxcar hairdo at the base of the skull. The turn causes his face to start to mash in the ciliated hull of her beehive hairdo, and so she rolls her head 180 degrees to the other side, using their mouths for the pivot. But aside from good hair grooming, they are oblivious to everything but each other. Everybody gives them a once-over. Disgusting! Amusing! How touching! A few kids pass by and say things like "Swing it, baby." But the great majority in that heaving funnel up the stairs seem to be as much astounded as anything else. The vision of love at rush hour cannot strike anyone exactly as romance. It is a feat, like a fat man crossing the English Channel in a barrel. It is an earnest accomplishment against the tide. It is a piece of slightly gross heroics, after the manner of those knobby, varicose old men who come out from some place in baggy shorts every year and run through the streets of Boston in the Marathon race. And somehow that is the gaffe against love all week long in New York, for everybody, not just two kids writhing under their coiffures in the 50th Street subway station; too hurried, too crowded, too hard, and no time for dalliance.

Meaning

1. Wolfe illustrates "the gaffe against love all week long in New York." What precisely is the "gaffe"? What do the details suggest about the Thursday morning mood of New Yorkers?

2. What does the description of the showcase and of 50th Street imply about the world of the lovers? Would they stand out in any setting? Does Wolfe find the lovers comical, or is he sympathetic and admiring?

How similar is Wolfe's view of New York to White's, in the quality of life or its pace?

Composition

1. Every piece of writing suggests something about the personality, interests, and ideas of the author, even when he or she speaks to us through a narrator. Discuss the impression you receive of the author of this selection.

2. Describe one or two people in a situation made comical by the setting. Allow your reader to visualize the setting as well as the situation through your choice of examples.

John Updike

(March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009)

Born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932, John Hoyer Updike began his long association with The New Yorker early in his career and has published many of his poems, stories, and essays in that magazine. His collection of stories The Music School won the O. Henry Award in 1966. He received the National Book Award in 1963 for his novel The Centaur and the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1981 for Rabbit Is Rich. His novel Rabbit at Rest was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1991. The speaker in one of Updike's stories is describing his grandmother as he remembers her from his youth: "At the time 1 was married, she was in her late seventies, crippled and enfeebled. She had fought a long battle with Parkinson's disease-, in my earliest memories of her she is touched with it. Her fingers and back are bent; there is a tremble about her as she moved about through the dark, odd-shaped rooms of our house in the town where 1 was born." His thoughts turn in this passage to happier days.

MY GRANDMOTHER

'When we were all still alive, the five of us in that kerosene-lit house, on Friday and Saturday nights, at an hour when in the spring and summer there was still abundant light in the air, I would set out in my father's car for town, where my friends lived. ²I had, by moving ten miles away, at last acquired friends: an illustration of that strange law whereby, like Orpheus leading Eurydice, we achieve our desire by turning our back on it. ³1 had even gained a girl, so that the vibrations were as sexual as social that made me jangle with anticipation as I clowned in front of the mirror in our kitchen, shaving from a basin of stove-heated water, combing my hair with a dripping comb, adjusting my reflection in the mirror until I had achieved just that electric angle from which my face seemed beautiful and everlastingly, by the very volumes of air and sky and grass that lay mutely banked about our home, beloved. "My grandmother would hover near me, watching fearfully, as she had when I was a child, afraid that I would fall from a tree.

'Delirious, humming, I would swoop and lift her, lift her like a child, crooking one arm under her knees and cupping the other behind her back. "Exultant in my height, my strength, I would lift that frail brittle body weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and twirl with it in my arms while the rest of the family watched with startled smiles of alarm.

Had I stumbled, or dropped her, I might have broken her back, but my joy always proved a secure cradle. And whatever irony was in the impulse, whatever implicit contrast between this ancient husk, scarcely female, and the pliant, warm girl I would embrace before the evening was done, direct delight flooded away: I was carrying her who had carried me, I was giving my past a dance, I had lifted the anxious caretaker of my childhood from the floor, I was bringing her with my boldness to the edge of danger, from which she had always sought to guard me.

Meaning

1 How does Updike construct sentence 3 to take advantage of the strong terminal position? Does the context justify the double emphasis given to beloved?

2. Sentence 3 develops through an accumulation of detail. Does the sentence develop a single idea? Could Updike break it up without interrupting the meaning or disturbing the effect?

3 What technique aids in achieving the climax in sentences 5 and 8? Does the same kind of sentence construction achieve it?

Composition

1 Describe an episode involving a close relative or friend that reveals a special relationship. Let your details reveal the relationship; do not state it directly.

2. Compare Updike's depiction of his grandmother with any other description, focusing on the chief similarity or difference in attitude or personal relationship.

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

(21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890)

John Henry Newman also referred to as Cardinal Newman or Blessed John Henry Newman, one of the influential English religious leaders of the nineteenth century, entered the Catholic Church in 1845 and two years later was ordained as priest. In 1879 he was appointed cardinal of the Church. Rector of the Catholic University of Dublin from 1851 to 1858, Newman delivered a series of lectures on university education—published in 1873 as The Idea of a University. The chief purpose of a university is to develop the power to think, Newman argues. Though knowledge is a means to "material and moral advancement." it is "an end in itself," and should be valued for its own sake. Newman argues this point by analogy in this section from a discourse late in the book, Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill.

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