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Here is what Trout said when he realized that the ten-year rerun was over, that he and everybody else were suddenly obligated to think of new stuff to do, to be creative again: “Oh, Lordy! I am much too old and experienced to start playing Russian roulette with free will again.”
I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.
So it is not one whit mysterious that we poison the water and air and topsoil, and construct ever more cunning doomsday devices, both industrial and military. Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can’t come soon enough.
The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it: “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!”
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.
He won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay with a mate that cracked?
what he’d done during the war, which he called “civilization’s second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.”
He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it. “He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door. “Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’”
Young Booboolings didn’t see any point in developing imaginations anymore, since all they had to do was turn on a switch and see all kinds of jazzy shit. They would look at a printed page or a painting and wonder how anybody could have gotten his or her rocks off looking at things that simple and dead.
She says, “Good-by, good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners… Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking… and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths… and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”
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.
“And then the shit really hit the fan. God made man and woman, beautiful little miniatures of Him and her, and turned them loose to see what might become of them. The Garden of Eden,” said Trout, “might be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games.”
“Satan,” he said, “couldn’t undo anything God had done. She could at least try to make existence for His little toys less painful. She could see what He couldn’t: To be alive was to be either bored or scared stiff. So she filled an apple with all sorts of ideas that might at least relieve the boredom, such as rules for games with cards and dice, and how to fuck, and recipes for beer and wine and whiskey, and pictures of different plants that were smokable, and so on. And instructions on how to make music and sing and dance real crazy, real sexy.
“Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous.”
As the old saying goes: “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.”
I asked if he had committed a lot of that remarkable author’s words to memory. He said, “Yes, dear colleague, including a single sentence which describes life as lived by human beings so completely that no writer after him need ever have written another word.” “Which sentence was that, Mr. Trout?” I asked. And he said, “‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’”
I cover paper with words every day, But the stories never go anywhere I find worth going.
“If your brains were dynamite, there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”
“The timequake of 2001 was a cosmic charley horse in the sinews of Destiny. At what was in New York City 2:27 p.m. on February 13th of that year, the Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point? “It fibrillated with indecision. Maybe it should have a family reunion back where it all began, and then make a great big BANG again. “It suddenly shrunk ten years. It zapped me and everybody else back to February 17th, 1991, what was for me 7:51 a.m., and a line outside a blood bank in San Diego, California. “For reasons best known to
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“That the rerun lasted ten years, short a mere four days, some are saying now, is proof that there is a God, and that He is on the Decimal System. He has ten fingers and ten toes, just as we do, they say, and uses them when He does arithmetic.
To him, plagiarism was what Trout would have called a mopery, “indecent exposure in the presence of a blind person of the same sex.”
“When will you ever learn that nobody cares anything about you, you, you, you boring, insignificant piece of poop? Your whole problem is you think you matter! Get over that, or sashay your stuck-up butt the hell out of here!”
And then he asked it: “How the hell did I do that?” *** That question remains for me in the summer of 1996 one of my three favorite quotations. Two of the three are questions rather than good advice of any kind. The second is Jesus Christ’s “Who is it they say I am?” The third is from my son Mark, pediatrician and watercolorist and sax player. I’ve already quoted him in another book: “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
It was wintertime, and I myself was awarded my country’s second-lowest decoration, a Purple Heart for frostbite. *** 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.
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can’t.
The Bible may be the Greatest Story Ever Told, but the most popular story you can ever tell is about a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it is still a novelty.”
say in lectures in 1996 that fifty percent or more of American marriages go bust because most of us no longer have extended families. When you marry somebody now, all you get is one person. I say that when couples fight, it isn’t about money or sex or power. What they’re really saying is, “You’re not enough people!” Sigmund Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to.
In my opinion, Trout, far from giving yet another high colonic to our aborigines, is raising the question, perhaps too subtly, of whether great discoveries, such as the existence of another hemisphere, or of accessible atomic energy, really make people any happier than they were before.
Then again, I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That’s how come I write so good.
Trout was the only appreciative audience he needed for what he was and did.
“Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”
I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake, people don’t change, don’t learn anything from their mistakes, and don’t apologize.
I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.
“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.
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.
I went on: “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.
“There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch.
Trout could have been a great advertising man. The same has been said of Jesus Christ.
Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!
I have heard of an eastern monarch who once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence which would be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, ‘And this too shall pass away.’
The only contemporary American writer we could think of who had given us a new word, and surely not because he is a famous pervert, which he isn’t, was Joseph Heller. The title of his first novel, Catch-22, is defined this way in my Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary: “A problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem.”
You think the ancient Romans were smart? Look at how dumb their numbers were. One theory of why they declined and fell is that their plumbing was lead. The root of our word plumbing is plumbum, the Latin word for “lead.” Lead poisoning makes people stupid and lazy. What’s your excuse?
