Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Updike

Updike is smuggling a big, almost heretical claim into a cozy metaphor: fiction doesn’t merely entertain; it functions like belief. “Inner spaces” makes reading sound architectural and private, less like consuming a plot than entering a room you didn’t know existed in yourself. Then he sharpens it with “old apartments of religion,” a phrase that carries both nostalgia and vacancy. Apartments are lived-in, imperfect, subdivided; they’re not cathedrals. Religion, in this framing, isn’t a soaring doctrine so much as a set of human rooms once occupied by ritual, awe, fear, consolation. Stories reopen those rooms after the tenants have moved out.

The intent is not to declare literature a new church, but to argue for its spiritual utility in a post-certainty age. Updike’s career sat in the long American afterglow of mainline Protestant confidence, when secular modernity didn’t abolish religious hunger so much as reroute it. His subtext: people still need places to rehearse meaning, guilt, grace, and mortality; the novel supplies a non-dogmatic vestibule to those experiences. A “good story” offers access without demanding assent, communion without creed.

There’s also a sly note of ambivalence. “Old apartments” can be charming or shabby; they can smell like someone else’s life. Updike, a writer fascinated by desire and sin in the suburbs, suggests that fiction inherits religion’s intimate work: letting us inhabit other consciences, confront transcendence, and feel the pressure of the unseen, even if we no longer name it God.