Daily Inspiration Quote by John Updike

Updike’s line flatters religion while slyly shrinking it. He doesn’t frame faith as cosmic truth so much as a practical technology: a way to keep the blankness at the edge of consciousness from swallowing the day. “Nothingness” here isn’t just atheistic nihilism; it’s the everyday, quietly brutal fact of mortality, contingency, the sense that the universe offers no built-in narration. Religion, in this formulation, is less a cathedral than a set of mental ergonomics.

The verb choice matters. “Enables” is managerial, almost bureaucratic, suggesting utility over revelation. And “ignore” is the tell: not answer, not defeat, not transfigure. Ignore. Updike grants the void its existence and then describes faith as the sanctioned act of looking away so you can pay the bills, raise kids, write novels, endure cancer scares, and pretend the calendar isn’t a countdown. It’s an unusually candid apology for belief from a writer often associated with suburban surfaces and the metaphysical itch underneath them.

Contextually, Updike belongs to a postwar American cohort whose prosperity didn’t cancel dread; it merely gave dread better furniture. Mid-century affluence made “the jobs of life” multiply - careers, mortgages, reputations - while secular modernity made “nothingness” harder to dodge. The subtext is both compassionate and faintly chastening: humans may be too cognitively and emotionally limited to stare at the abyss for long without losing function. Religion becomes a culturally inherited coping mechanism that keeps civilization running, not because it proves God, but because it keeps Monday possible.