Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

What she said about that was this: “Good riddance of bad rubbish. It was rotting your brain because it was about absolutely nothing. Now give the rest of them the old heave-ho!”

This makes me hate Circe Berman.

And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.

I reflect on that a lot, as a moderately gifted person.

In the background was the most beautiful skyscraper in the world, the Chrysler Building.

Still true.