Reading John Updike (1784)

He makes it look easy and advisable to slow down and write long passages describing short interchanges and short passages describing the rise and fall of entire civilizations and he'll bathe it all in bath-warm prose that *just* barely somehow avoids the maudlin but it's damned close, and that itself is thrilling, like riding in a sedate old car along the edge of a steep gorge that has been formed over millions of years by the steady erosion of the River Cheez, which, from this height, looks like a yellow thread laid over the brown rocks.