Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

For practically everybody, the end of the world can’t come soon enough.

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.

In my novel Cat’s Cradle, I say that anybody whose life keeps tangling up with yours for no logical reason is likely a member of your karass, a team God has formed to get something done for Him.

“If there is a God, He sure hates people.

“Western Civilization’s second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.”

When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, “You’re a man now!” I damn near killed my first German.

I said at supper one night that women weren’t even the best cooks or clothing makers. Men were. And Mother dumped a pitcher of water over my head.

Then again, I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That’s how come I write so good.

And well might any educated person excrete a sizable chunk of masonry when contemplating the tremendously truthful ideas this ordinary mortal, seemingly, uttered, with no more to go by, as far as we know, than signals from his dog’s breakfast, from his three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge.

My father often misquoted Shakespeare, but I never saw him read a book.

All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.

I would have recognized the opportunity for a world-class joke, but would never allow myself to be funny at the cost of making somebody else feel like something the cat drug in. Let that be my epitaph.

The epiphany at the end, as I recall, is that we shouldn’t be seeking harrowing challenges, but rather tasks we find natural and interesting, tasks we were apparently born to perform.

“Of native talent itself I say in speeches: ‘If you go to a big city, and a university is a big city, you are bound to run into Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Stay home, stay home.’” *** To put it another way: No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak.

Many years later, he would kill himself on purpose with a twelve-gauge shotgun. *** Another friend and client of his said he couldn’t possibly have committed suicide, it was so out of character. I replied, “Even with military training, there is no way a man can accidentally blow his head off with a shotgun.”

“Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don’t. You don’t have to say why afterward. You don’t have to say anything.

“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.”

So we have in this summer of 1996, rerun or not, and as always, faithless custodians of capital making themselves multimillionaires and multibillionaires, while playing beanbag with money better spent on creating meaningful jobs and training people to fill them, and raising our young and retiring our old in surroundings of respect and safety. For Christ’s sake, let’s help more of our frightened people get through this thing, whatever it is. *** Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for. Should the nation’s wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

I of course understand that the widespread revulsion inspired even now, and perhaps forever, by the word Communism is a sane response to the cruelties and stupidities of the dictators of the USSR, who called themselves, hey presto, Communists, just as Hitler called himself, hey presto, a Christian. To children of the Great Depression, however, it still seems a mild shame to outlaw from polite thought, because of the crimes of tyrants, a word that in the beginning described for us nothing more than a possibly reasonable alternative to the Wall Street crapshoot.

Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!

Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”