Love & Passion Quote by John Updike

Updike turns desire into a kind of semiotics lesson, and it’s both elegant and a little unnerving. Bodies, in his framing, aren’t merely attractive; they’re “messages,” emissaries from biology and culture that arrive preloaded with instructions. The phrase “glowing signifiers” borrows the prestige of literary theory, but Updike weaponizes that vocabulary to make lust feel unavoidable, even respectable. If you can call it a “signifier,” you can pretend it’s an idea, not an impulse. That’s the trick: elevating appetite into meaning without denying its blunt force.

The subtext is classic Updike: erotic attention as revelation, but also as destiny. “What we must do” and “our own necessities” shift agency away from the viewer and onto some internal script - hormones, lineage, heterosexual convention, the pressure to pair off and reproduce. It’s a worldview that flatters the self (“my desire is true, even necessary”) while quietly shrinking the other person into an instrument panel of cues. The other sex becomes readable, interpretable, a prompt - less a full subject than a luminous trigger for your private needs.

Context matters. Updike’s mid-century American fiction is saturated with the tensions of postwar domesticity: marriage as a social engine, sex as escape hatch, gender roles as both trap and turn-on. This line captures that era’s confidence in “male and female alike” symmetry while smuggling in a more traditional assumption: that heterosexual desire is the central grammar of adulthood. It works because it’s beautiful, and because it’s perilously close to how people rationalize wanting what they want.