Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, “The Beatles did.”

The funniest American of his time, Mark Twain, found life for himself and everybody else so stressful when he was in his seventies, like me, that he wrote as follows: “I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood.” That is in an essay on the sudden death of his daughter Jean a few days earlier. Among those he wouldn’t have resurrected were Jean, and another daughter, Susy, and his beloved wife, and his best friend, Henry Rogers. Twain didn’t live to see World War One, but still he felt that way.

Henry David Thoreau said most famously, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” So it is not one whit mysterious that we poison the water and air and topsoil, and construct ever more cunning doomsday devices, both industrial and military. Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can’t come soon enough.

The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it: “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!”

Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.

I asked the late great German novelist Heinrich Boll what the basic flaw was in the German character. He said, “Obedience.”

Despite my having lived for eighty-four years, or ninety-four, if you want to count the rerun, many questions about the Universe remain for me unanswered.

“If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Trout said, “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in.”

Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn’t peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.

Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can’t.

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But as I have reported elsewhere, she said, “Just because you’re talented, that doesn’t mean you have to do something with it.”

My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny playwright, said in his eighties that if he was considered smart, he sure pitied people who were considered dumb. He said that, having lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as a reasonably competent office boy. That’s how I feel.

I would have recognized the opportunity for a world-class joke, but would never allow myself to be funny at the cost of making somebody else feel like something the cat drug in. Let that be my epitaph.

I still quote Eugene Debs (1855-1926), late of Terre Haute, Indiana, five times the Socialist Party’s candidate for President, in every speech: “While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

My reply will go like this: “You might want to read the picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. The epiphany at the end, as I recall, is that we shouldn’t be seeking harrowing challenges, but rather tasks we find natural and interesting, tasks we were apparently born to perform.

“Artists,” he said, “are people who say, ‘I can’t fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!’ ”

As I have written elsewhere, this man is a saint. I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.

“Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness.”

And even in 1996, I in speeches propose the following amendments to the Constitution: Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity. Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage.

What we have created instead, as customers and employees and investors, is mountains of paper wealth so enormous that a handful of people in charge of them can take millions and billions for themselves without hurting anyone. Apparently.

I asked my big brother Bernie in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and this was long before the period of the rerun, whether he believed in Darwin’s theory of evolution. He said he did, and I asked how come, and he said, “Because it’s the only game in town.”

So we have in this summer of 1996, rerun or not, and as always, faithless custodians of capital making themselves multimillionaires and multibillionaires, while playing beanbag with money better spent on creating meaningful jobs and training people to fill them, and raising our young and retiring our old in surroundings of respect and safety.

Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for. Should the nation’s wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

I had to add, though, that I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki.

The self-respects of most middle-class American people my age or older, and still alive, are out to pasture now, not a bad place to be. They munch. They ruminate.

I go home. I have had one heck of a good time. Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”

As Marc Antony, Booth would speak lines horrifyingly prophetic in his case: “The evil that men do lives after them.”

I got a sappy letter from a woman a while back. She knew I was sappy, too, which is to say a northern Democrat. She was pregnant, and she wanted to know if it was a mistake to bring an innocent little baby into a world this bad. I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably. They turned up in the most unexpected places. Perhaps you, dear reader, are or can become a saint for her sweet child to meet. I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around!

I’m wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I.

“Now then: Whatever heavenly bodies those two glints represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarefied that for light to go from one to the other would take thousands or millions of years. Ting-a-ling? But I now ask you to look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other.” “OK,” I said, “I did it.” “It took a second, do you think?” he said. “No more,” I said. “Even if you’d taken an hour,” he said, “something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light.” “What was it?” I said. “Your awareness,” he said. “That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness.” Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper dental plate would not slip when he said his last words to us that enchanted evening. All was well with his teeth. This was his finale: “I have thought of a better word than awareness,” he said. “Let us call it soul.” He paused.

He was enraptured at the very end by a collection of sayings of Albert Einstein. Example: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Another: “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”

Bernard was himself so open-minded about how the universe might be dealt with that he thought praying would help, possibly, in drastic situations. When his son Terry had cancer of the throat, Bernie, ever the experimentalist, prayed for his recovery. Terry indeed survived.

Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.

I was the baby of the family. Now I don’t have anybody to show off for anymore. A woman who knew Bernie for only the last ten days of his life, in the hospice at St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany, described his manners while dying as “courtly” and “elegant.” What a brother! What a language.