Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“So be it! So be it!” I cry in this manicured wilderness. “Who gives a damn!” Excuse this outburst.

like my blood relatives, no longer speak to me. “So be it! So be it!” I cry in this manicured wilderness. “Who gives a damn!” Excuse this outburst.

But I can stand loneliness, if I have to.

broke the pencil in two, and I threw its broken body into a waste-basket, like a baby rattlesnake which had wanted to poison me.

We look like a couple of gutshot iguanas! So

human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.

He welcomed all proofs that the planet he had known and loved during his boyhood had disappeared entirely. That was his way of honoring all the friends and relatives he had lost in the massacre.

“If anybody has discovered what life is all about,” Father might say, “it is too late. I am no longer interested.” “Never is heard a discouraging word,

DDT was another. It was going to kill all the bugs, and almost did. Nuclear

Lazarus would never die: How was that for a scheme to make the Son of God obsolete?

“You could build a whole new religion, and a much needed one, too, on a picture like that.” She

“Never trust a survivor,” my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, “until you find out what he did to stay alive.”

“Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn’t,” I said. “So everybody alive must have the Survivor’s Syndrome. It’s that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors! Nine times out of ten it’s a cannibal or billionaire!”

The first one was this: “Do you believe sometimes that you are a good person in a world where almost all of the other good people are dead?” “No,” I said. “Do you sometimes believe that you must be wicked, since all the good people are dead, and that the only way to clear your name is to be dead, too?” “No,” I said. “You may be entitled to the Survivor’s Syndrome, but you didn’t get it,” she said. “Would you like to try for tuberculosis instead?”

When I was a two-eyed boy, I was the best draughtsman they

And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.

Mrs. Berman has found it, as she has found everything of any emotional significance

This wearied me, but then, almost everything about the modern world wearies me.

bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.

had been so happy there! How I adored that train! God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

hoping to fire the flashbulb of recognition inside her skull.

According to Circe, this was his ultimate communiqué: “I was a radio repairman.” “Either his damaged brain believed that this was a literal truth,” she said, “or he had come to the conclusion that all the brains he had operated on were basically just receivers of signals from someplace else. Do you get the concept?” “I think I

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.

Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.

Jones, said, as though “apprentice” were another name for tapeworm, “It’s your apprentice.”

Everybody should be buried with somebody else, just about anybody else, whenever feasible.

Modern Art and outlaw the word democracy. After that he would make up a word for what we really are, make us face up to what we really are and always have been, and then strive for efficiency.

Yes, and now that I think about it: maybe the most admirable thing about the Abstract Expressionist painters, since so much senseless bloodshed had been caused by cockeyed history lessons, was their refusal to serve on such a court.

For one thing, I had learned a lot about the commercial art world by then, and knew that artists like me were a dime a dozen and all starving to death.

Except that what Pollock did lacked that greatest of all crowd pleasers, which was human sacrifice. • • •

Our brainless lovemaking anticipated Abstract Expressionism in a way, since it was about absolutely nothing but itself.

‘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?”

think: that shortfall, which we might call “personality,” or maybe even “pain.””

straitjacket containing the frantic meat of Slazinger.

Island uninhabitable for centuries. A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.

He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so. Beware of gods bearing gifts!

“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.’

An example: “You must be thinking very hard how important aerial photography is going to be, if war should come.” War, of course, had come to practically everybody but the United States by then.

“The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It’s always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.”

Before you leave, maybe you can persuade Lucrezia to show you all the medals she won.”

“Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren’t they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible. The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet.”

think I’ve reduced you to the level of self-esteem which men try to force on women. If I have, I would very much like to

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

hope very much that it is what you’re doing,” she said. “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!’ ” • • •

years after our reunion, June 7, 1953, and says that we have failed to paint pictures of nothing after all, that she easily identifies chaos in every canvas. This is a pleasant joke, of course. “Tell that to the rest of the Genesis Gang,” she says.

kind of joke. Everything we said was a kind of joke.

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.”

“So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, “I just flense them and forgive them.” “Flense?” he said. “What’s flense?” “It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people—get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.” “Where would you ever come across a word like flense?” he said. And I said: “In an edition of Moby Dick illustrated by Dan Gregory.”

‘Why don’t you do that all the time?’ And I said to her, and this was the first time I ever said ‘fuck’ to her, no matter how angry we might have been with each other: ‘It’s just too fucking easy.’ ”

had better explain to young readers that the Shroud of Turin is a linen sheet in which a dead person has been wrapped, which bears the imprint of an adult male who has been crucified, which the best scientists of today agree may indeed be two thousand years old. It is widely believed to have swaddled none other than Jesus Christ, and is the chief treasure of the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in Turin, Italy.