Sucker's Portfolio

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Perhaps there were in the universe forms of life — the flying-saucer men, say — who scampered through time wherever their fancy took them. They would laugh at earth men, to whom time was a one-way street with a dead end in sight.

Time had won again — had stolen another human being from those who loved him. Suddenly, David was aware that he had been talking aloud the whole time, angrily — that he was behaving, not with the grave concern of a man saving a life, but with the rage of a brawler. He felt no emotion toward the man under his hands, felt only hate for their common tormentor — time.

“Drowned men, electrocuted men, suffocated men, they’re usually perfectly good men — good lungs, good heart, kidneys, liver, everything in first-rate shape. They’re dead is all. If you catch a situation like that quick enough, sometimes you can do something with it.”

“Don’t ask me to explain,” he tells her. “One doesn’t have to explain one’s actions in dreams.” He pauses. “In wars.” He pauses again. “In life.” Ulm has him pause again. “In love,” he says, and he drifts off into the night.

“If she was so terrible to you, why do you keep her picture?” she said. “It’s like a man who’s been shot wanting the bullet for a souvenir,” he said.

“He’s worked so hard all his life that he’s never learned how to play,” she said. “Play is harder on Arthur than work. This trip was all my idea, and I can see now what a bad idea it was. The minute we got to England, Arthur got all panicky, wanted to call off the rest of the trip, wanted to go back home to 4916 Graceland Avenue.”

“Didn’t learn a damn thing from those records,” said Futz. “Any language is just noises people make with their mouths. Somebody makes a noise at me, and I make a noise back at him.”

‘This is all a dream. Go ahead and be the fool you are, and see what happens.’”

“I sure don’t love me much any more,”

The great graphic artist Saul Steinberg, a native of Romania, now a resident of New York City, thanks to Christopher Columbus and Adolf Hitler,

But making a spine for history out of memorized dates has the side effect of teaching that human destiny is governed by sudden and explosive events, strictly localized in space and time. The truth is that we are the playthings of systems as complex and turbulent as the weather systems pondered by my big brother Bernard.

We like to pretend that so many important discoveries have been made on a certain day, unexpectedly, by one person rather than by a system seeking such knowledge, I think, because we hope that life is like a lottery, where simply anyone can come up with a winning ticket.

I said to a Jewish friend recently, Sidney Offit, a novelist who occasionally comments on political matters on TV, that I had heard from somewhere that Christopher Columbus might have been Jewish. “Oh God,” he exclaimed. “I hope not.” “I meant to delight you,” I said truthfully. “Why would you hope not?” “We’re in enough trouble already,” he said.

Our friend Kirkpatrick concludes in his book that Europeans came ashore “in what they dimly realized was the land of Paradise…but all they ever found was half a world of nature’s treasures and nature’s people that could be taken, and they took them, never knowing, never learning the true regenerative power there, and that opportunity was lost. Theirs was indeed a conquest of Paradise, but as is inevitable with any war against the world of nature, those who win will have lost — once again lost, and this time perhaps forever.”

I have to wonder if obedience isn’t the basic flaw in most of humankind.

There are only the two of us here, in a house which appears on a map drawn in 1740. I have calculated that Claude’s and my house is twice as old as the theory that invisible germs can cause disease. A woman who knows a lot about cats, or pretends to, told me that white cats with eyes like Claude’s are deaf on the side of the blue eye. I have yet to devise an experiment that can confirm this, or, alternatively, to demonstrate that the woman is as full of shit as a Christmas turkey. I am 69 years old now, and my father didn’t go to the New World in the sky until he was 72, so I still have lots of time in which to experiment on Claude. I will need some apparatus, and there will be a temporary loss of dignity on the part of Claude. But without experimentation on lower animals, this world would be an even worse place than it is today. And Claude tortures mice before he kills them. Like Christopher Columbus, he knows nothing of the Beatitudes.

He has the radiant look peculiar to bullies. That is, Mayor Jack assumes that he is lovable because so many people go to so much trouble to keep on the right side of him.