Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“Only when free will kicked in again could they stop running obstacle courses of their own construction.

I am much too old and experienced to start playing Russian roulette with free will again.”

Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can’t come soon enough.

That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, “being alive is a crock of shit.”

Somebody should have told him that being a physicist, on a planet where the smartest animals hate being alive so much, means never having to say you’re sorry.

Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.

He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it.

“When I was growing up, my father was a car salesman who couldn’t get a job teaching at Cape Cod Junior College.”

“There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.”

The moral at the end of that story is this: “Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.

They say the first thing to go when you’re old is your legs or your eyesight. It isn’t true. The first thing to go is parallel parking.

our war would live forever in show biz, as other wars would not, because of the uniforms of the Nazis.

“We are evidently preparing,” he said, “to fight World War Three in the midst of an enormous Spanish omelet.”

I hate to tell you this, friends and neighbors, but we are teensy-weensy implications in an enormous implication. If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to where you came from?

Power was implied by weakness.

lost friends to one of three addictions: alcohol or religion or chess.

“Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous.”

“If you have a Hungarian for a friend, you don’t need an enemy.”

“If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.”

“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism.

“It was free will that did all the damage.

I still can’t get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve.

“Beware of gods bearing gifts.”

“FUCK ART!”

“I didn’t need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of shit. I already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books.”

“Rerun or not, modern transportation is a game of inches.”

“Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”

He wrote about challenges and responses, saying that various civilizations persisted or failed depending on whether or not the challenges they faced were just too much for them. He

“In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.”

the greatest writer in the English language so far was Lancelot Andrewes

“While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Roger himself had surely departed more than one tennis tournament having, like Skip, undergone a colostomy to his self-regard.

Bernie’s ashes should be scattered over the dome of a towering thunderhead.

“Artists,” he said, “are people who say, ‘I can’t fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!’”

I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.

Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop? Answer: That is bird poop, too.

“Dear Brother: This is almost like telling you about the birds and the bees,” I began. “There are many good people who are beneficially stimulated by some, but not all, manmade arrangements of colors and shapes on flat surfaces, essentially nonsense.

“You are a justly revered experimentalist, dear Brother. If you really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, ‘art or not,’ you must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. Let me know what happens.”

“People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?

“Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness.”

“Hello, my name is Spalding. No doubt you’ve played with my balls.”

What we have created instead, as customers and employees and investors, is mountains of paper wealth so enormous that a handful of people in charge of them can take millions and billions for themselves without hurting anyone. Apparently.

But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.