The Sirens of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.

These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth—a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

Only the human soul remained terra incognita. This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom. What were people like in olden times, with their souls as yet unexplored?

all the words between timid and Timbuktu in very small dictionaries relate to time.

The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent aren’t everything.

To be punctual meant to exist as a point, meant that as well as to arrive somewhere on time. Constant existed as a point—could not imagine what it would be like to exist in any other way.

the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.

The reason both Daddies can be right and still get into terrible fights is because there are so many different ways of being right. There

Chrono (kroh-no) means time. Synclastic (sin-classtick) means curved toward the same side in all directions, like the skin of an orange. Infundibulum (in-fun-dib-u-lum) is what the ancient Romans like Julius Caesar and Nero called a funnel.

Constant, who had offered his services to God as a messenger, now panicked before the very moderate greatness of Rumfoord. Constant ransacked his memory for past proofs of his own greatness.

"When I ran my space ship into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, it came to me in a flash that everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been."

To contrast Malachi Constant of Hollywood with Winston Niles Rumfoord of Newport and Eternity: Everything Rumfoord did he did with style, making all mankind look good. Everything Constant did he did in style—aggressively, loudly, childishly, wastefully—making himself and mankind look bad. Constant bristled with courage—but it was anything but un-neurotic. Every courageous thing he had ever done had been motivated by spitefulness and by goads from childhood that made fear seem puny indeed.

"You want to fly through space? God has already given you the most wonderful space ship in all creation! Yes! Speed? You want speed? The space ship God has given you goes sixty-six thousand miles an hour—and will keep on running at that speed for all eternity, if God wills it. You want a space ship that will carry men in comfort? You’ve got it! It won’t carry just a rich man and his dog, or just five men or ten men. No! God is no piker! He’s given you a space ship that will carry billions of men, women, and children! Yes! And they don’t have to stay strapped in chairs of wear fishbowls over their heads. No! Not on God’s space ship. The people on God’s space ship can go swimming, and walk in the sunshine and play baseball and go ice skating and go for family rides in the family automobile on Sunday after church and a family chicken dinner!"

the Director of Public Relations of Magnum Opus, Incorporated, the corporation whose sole purpose was to manage the Constant affairs. The purpose of the collection had been to

In crossing the bright zodiac on the foyer floor, he sensed that the spiral staircase now swept down rather than up. Constant became the bottommost point in a whirlpool of fate.

"Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.

It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand.

"Look forward to being really in love for the first time, Bea," said Rumfoord. "Look forward to behaving aristocratically without any outward proofs of your aristocracy. Look forward to having nothing but the dignity and intelligence and tenderness that God gave you—look forward to taking those materials and nothing else, and making something exquisite with them."

The people who can’t understand it are people who have to believe, for their own peace of mind, that tremendous wealth can be produced only by tremendous cleverness.

It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.

just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired.

Life was like that, Unk told himself tentatively— blanks and glimpses, and now and then maybe that awful flash of pain for doing something wrong.

Unk wondered if there were people who could stand more pain than others. He supposed this was the case. He supposed tearfully that he was especially sensitive in this regard. Without wishing the writer any harm, Unk wished the writer could feel, just once, the pains as Unk felt them.

Unk had no way of judging the quality of the information contained in the letter. He accepted it all hungrily, uncritically. And, in accepting it, Unk gained an understanding of life that was identical with the writer’s understanding of life. Unk wolfed down a philosophy.

Somebody made everything for some reason.

when you get settled down, all of you spend a lot of time trying to figure out why whoever made everything went and made it.

Break every link with air and mist, Seal every open vent; Make throat as tight as miser’s fist, Keep life within you pent. Breathe out, breathe in, no more, no more, For breathing’s for the meek; And when in deathly space we soar, Be careful not to speak. If you with grief or joy are rapt, Just signal with a tear; To soul and heart within you trapped Add speech and atmosphere. Every man’s an island as in lifeless space we roam. Yes, every man’s an island: island fortress, island home.

"Both the man and his mate were frequent visitors to the psychiatric wards of their respective hospitals. And it is perhaps food for thought," said Rumfoord, "that this supremely frustrated man was the only Martian to write a philosophy, and that this supremely self-frustrating woman was the only Martian to write a poem."

woman in the love story—the woman who had that man’s baby?" said Rumfoord. "The woman who was the only poet on Mars?" "What about her?" said Unk. He didn’t care much about her. He hadn’t caught on that the woman in Rumfoord’s story was Bee, was his own mate. "She’d been married for several years before she got to Mars," said Rumfoord. "But when the hot-shot lieutenant-colonel got to her there in the space ship bound for Mars, she was still a virgin." Winston Niles Rumfoord winked at Unk before shutting the outside door of the airlock. "Pretty good joke on her husband, eh, Unk?" he said.

The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

"Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

"I’ve never been alive that I can remember," said Unk brokenly. "I thought I was finally going to get some living done."

Unk liked to twist things around to where it seemed that anybody who was happy was dumb or crazy. "What makes a man be like that?" Boaz asked the little harmonium in his thoughts. "What’s he think he’s gaining compared to what he’s throwing away? No wonder he looks sick."

"Just because something feels better than anything else," he said in his thoughts, "that don’t mean it’s good for you."

found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I’m doing good, and them I’m doing good for know I’m doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home. "And when I die down here some day," said Boaz, "I’m going to be able to say to myself, ’Boaz—you made millions of lives worth living. Ain’t nobody ever spread more joy. You ain’t got an enemy in the Universe.’ " Boaz became for himself the affectionate Mama and Papa he’d never had. " ’You go to sleep now,’ " he said to himself, imagining himself on a stone deathbed in the caves. " ’You’re a good boy, Boaz,’ " he said. " ’Good night.’

happens to you. He didn’t go to any trouble to get you here safe and sound, any more than He would go to the trouble to kill you." He raised his arms, demonstrating the muscularity of his faith. The balls of shot in the handicap bags on his wrists shifted swishingly, drawing Unk’s attention. From the handicap bags, Unk’s attention made an easy jump to the heavy slab of iron on Redwine’s chest. Redwine followed the trend of Unk’s gaze, hefted the iron slab on his chest. "Heavy," he said.

The concessionaires knew all too well about Rumfoord’s penchant for realism. When Rumfoord staged a passion play, he used nothing but real people in real hells.

The proposition that God Almighty admired Beatrice for her touch-me-not breeding is at least as questionable as the proposition that God Almighty wanted Malachi Constant to be rich.

Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.

These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.

And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a highe...

And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be.

The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all. The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else. And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, "Tralfamadore."

The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky—as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment. The big eye was a glutton for great theater. The big eye was indifferent as to whether the Earthling shows were comedy, tragedy, farce, satire, athletics, or vaudeville. Its demand, which Earthings apparently found as irresistible as gravity, was that the shows be great. The demand was so powerful that Earthlings did almost nothing but perform for it, night and day—and even in their dreams.

Salo looked down into the water of the rectangular pool. In the bottom of the pool, in eight feet of water, were the three sirens of Titan, the three beautiful human females who had been offered to the lecherous Malachi Constant so long ago. They were statues made by Salo of Titanic peat. Of the millions of statues made by Salo, only these three were painted with lifelike colors. It had been necessary to paint them in order to give them importance in the sumptuous, oriental scheme of things in Rumfoord’s palace.

Saint Elmo’s fire is a luminous electrical discharge, and any creature afflicted by it is subject to discomfort no worse than the discomfort of being tickled by a feather. All the same, the creature appears to be on fire, and can be forgiven for being dismayed. The luminous discharge

No movement of so much as a pinfeather was inharmonious. Life was but a soaring dream.

"If you could see this in the future," said Salo miserably, "why didn’t you mention it before?" "Nobody likes to think he’s being used," said Rumfoord. "He’ll put off admitting it to himself until the last possible instant." He smiled crookedly. "It may surprise you to learn that I take a certain pride, no matter how foolishly mistaken that pride may be, in making my own decisions for my own reasons."

"it isn’t as though I were dying or something. Everything that ever was always will be, and everything that ever will be always was."

"Against all orders from Tralfamadore," said Winston Niles Rumfoord, "against all your instincts as a machine, but in the name of our friendship, Salo, I want you to open the message and read it to me now."