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John Updike's 'Perfection Wasted'

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John Updike begins “Perfection Wasted” with the line, “And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, which took a whole life to develop and market” (Updike, line 1-3), he says that one of the downsides to dying is losing everything you’ve worked your whole life to get. We work hard most of our lives to become something other than ordinary and when we’re finally extraordinary we start to wither away and die. He goes on to say that the phrases we’ve been known to say, our sarcastic statements, and our bias towards certain people all die with us. When we die we take all the delight and sorrow we’ve caused from the world. No one can make someone feel the way we have. When we die the feelings we have and can
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