Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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.

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

“My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important. He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it.

‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’”

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.

“All Satan wanted to do was help, and she did in many cases,” he concluded. “And her record for promoting nostrums with occasionally dreadful side effects is no worse than that of the most reputable pharmaceutical houses of the present day.”

Acculturated persons are those who find that they are no longer treated as the sort of people they thought they were, because the outside world has changed.

Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.

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

“People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist.

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.

“There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France.

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

And even in 1996, I in speeches propose the following amendments to the Constitution: Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity. Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage.

My grandchildren are already doing much of their reading from words projected on the face of a video screen.

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.

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.

Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for.

“You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”