Books, Arts & Manners: The Observer Observed

Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, by John Updike (Knopf, 257 pp., $18.95)

In “On Not Being a Dove,” the best of the six autobiographical essays in Self-Consciousness, John Updike explains his discontent with the superficial pacifism of anti-Vietnam protestors: “To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.”

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Richard Vigilante

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Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, by John Updike (Knopf, 257 pp., $18.95)

In “On Not Being a Dove,” the best of the six autobiographical essays in Self-Consciousness, John Updike explains his discontent with the superficial pacifism of anti-Vietnam protestors: “To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.”