Cat's Cradle

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed. She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

Her smile was glassy, and she was ransacking her mind for something to say, finding nothing in it but used Kleenex and costume jewelry.

“We all missed a lot,” Dr. Breed agreed. “We’d all do well to start over again, preferably with kindergarten.”

“Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.” “You don’t seem to agree.” “I don’t know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.”

“Do any conversations stick in your mind?” “There was one where he bet I couldn’t tell him anything that was absolutely true. So I said to him, ‘God is love.’” “And what did he say?” “He said, ‘What is God? What is love?’” “Um.” “But God really is love, you know,” said Miss Faust, “no matter what Dr. Hoenikker said.”

“It’s a small world,” I observed. “When you put it in a cemetery, it is.”

“Pretty, was she?” “Pretty?” he echoed. “Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings and not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest face that ever could be.

“Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”

They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed of only two persons.

“It said a lot of things,” she said, “because I was very upset about how Americans couldn’t imagine what it was like to be something else, to be something else and proud of it.”

‘Americans,’” he said, quoting his wife’s letter to the Times, “ ‘are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.’”

“The highest possible form of treason,” said Minton, “is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love.” “I guess Americans are hated a lot of places.” “People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. But the loyalty board didn’t pay any attention to that. All they knew was that Claire and I both felt that Americans were unloved.”

“How does he know what’s important? I could carve a better man out of a banana.”

“My God—life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?” “Don’t try,” he said. “Just pretend you understand.”

Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?” Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.

“Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out.” “Or the college professors.” “Or the college professors,” I agreed. I shook my head. “No, I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”

record that fact for whatever it may be worth. “Write it all down,” Bokonon tells us. He is really telling us, of course, how futile it is to write or read histories. “Without accurate records of the past, how can men and women be expected to avoid making serious mistakes in the future?” he asks ironically.

“I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. “But they are murdered children all the same.

“Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.

Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely. “Everything must have a purpose?” asked God. “Certainly,” said man. “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And He went away.

‘Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.” ’”