Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away. Let me put it another way: Dan Gregory was a taxidermist. He stuffed and mounted and varnished and mothproofed supposedly great moments, all of which turn out to be depressing dust-catchers, like a moosehead bought at a country auction or a sailfish on the wall of a dentist’s waiting room.

“God bless you!” I exclaimed. “Yes, and God fuck you,” he said.

You want some good advice?” “Yes, sir,” I said. “Never have anything to do with a woman who would rather be a man,” he said. “That means she’s never going to do what a woman is supposed to do—which leaves you stuck with both what a man’s supposed to do and what a woman’s supposed to do.

I can remember thinking that war was so horrible that, at last, thank goodness, nobody could ever be fooled by romantic pictures and fiction and history into marching to war again. Nowadays, of course, you can buy a machine gun with a plastic bayonet for your little kid at the nearest toy boutique. •

“I have had all I can stand of not taking myself seriously.”

Don’t you love it? This is real life we are now experiencing.

‘Contentedly adrift in the cosmos,’ were you?” Kitchen said to me. “That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while. How long did the feeling last?”

So there was something this seemingly fearless woman was afraid of. She was petrified by insanity.

Before he went to sleep the other night, he said that he could not help being what he was, for good or ill, that he was “that sort of molecule.” “Until the Great Atom Smasher comes to get me, Rabo,” he said, “this is the kind of molecule I have to be.”

“And what is literature, Rabo,” he said, “but an insider’s newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called ‘thought.’ ”

“It’s the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages,” I said. “Which is?” he said. “ ‘Good-bye,” ’ I said.

So I told her that the Universe began as an eleven-pound strawberry which exploded at seven minutes past midnight three trillion years ago.

One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

I am afraid that I said, too, in making light of my years as a warrior, that I had spent most of my time “… combing pussy out of my hair.” This meant that women had made themselves available to me in great numbers.

The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only useless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn’t catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.

She had had a life. I had accumulated anecdotes. She was home. Home was somewhere I never thought I’d be.

“After all that men have done to the women and children and every other defenseless thing on this planet, it is time that not just every painting, but every piece of music, every statue, every play, every poem and book a man creates, should say only this: ‘We are much too horrible for this nice place. We give up. We quit. The end!’

At the end of that evening, I remember, he said to me: “I can’t get over how passionate you guys are, and yet so absolutely unserious.” “Everything about life is a joke,” I said. “Don’t you know that?” “No,” he said.

“At this point in my life, sir,” said Kitchen, “I am a waste of time for women, and women are a waste of time for me.”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.” “Your what and your what?” he said. “My soul and my meat,” I said. “They’re separate?” he said.

“I sure hope they are,” I said. I laughed. “I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does.” I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.

said that sons of gifted men went into fields occupied by their fathers, but where their fathers were weak.

I’m sure she tamed her first husband, too, and thought of him lovingly and patronizingly as some kind of dumb animal.

“We’re having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true,” I said. “That’s how to act at a party.”

“the Japanese were as responsible as the Germans for turning Americans into a bunch of bankrupt militaristic fuckups—after we’d done such a good job of being sincere war-haters after the First World War.”

“They stole the nails from the Roman soldiers who were about to crucify Jesus,” she said. “When the soldiers looked for the nails, they had disappeared mysteriously. Gypsies had stolen them, and Jesus and the crowd had to wait until the soldiers sent for new nails. After that, God Almighty gave permission to all Gypsies to steal all they could.”