An old essay by John Updike ...

An old essay by John Updike begins, \'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.\' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : \'Consider the beer can.\' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. \'Pop-top\' and \'beer\' are at the bottom of the ladder, \'aesthetic experience\' at the top.
An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.
 John Updike

Quotes from the same author

Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
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 John Updike
I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.
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 John Updike
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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 John Updike
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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 John Updike
You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
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 John Updike