There are obvious truths about life, we are born, we live and we die. In the poem “Perfection Wasted” by John Updike he explains it a different way. He opens the poem as if he is mid-thought making the reader feel that they are entering in on the middle of a conversation: “And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,” (1, 2). Writing it this way shows that the narrator has been going on for a while, and thus has a lot of complaints. He says that after death your “brand”, the thing that makes you who you are ends. Your whole identity simply disappears once you are gone, despite you having worked your whole life on it. Everything you have done, all of your mannerisms, just cease to exist. Things like, “the
