Revisiting the Past

Ten days after I checked it out of the library, I finally inserted disc 1 of Rabbit Redux into the Matrix's CD player. Guess I'll have to listen to the book while cleaning windows and doing other household chores if I expect to finish it in 2 1/2 weeks.

Didn't take me long to be dazzled again. On the first page, Updike distills 10 years of urban renewal in 55 words.

The city, attempting to revive its dying downtown, has torn away blocks of buildings to create parking lots, so that a desolate openness, weedy and rubbled, spills through the once-packed streets, exposing church facades never seen from a distance and generating new perspectives of rear entryways and half-alleys and intensifying the cruel breadth of the light.