Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Somebody should have told him that being a physicist, on a planet where the smartest animals hate being alive so much, means never having to say you’re sorry.

In public lectures, I myself often say, “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.”

“Listen, if it isn’t a timequake dragging us through knothole after knothole, it’s something else just as mean and powerful.”

I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.

As for how little he was affected by the rerun, as compared with the hell it had been for most of the rest of us, he wrote in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: “I didn’t need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of shit. I already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books.”

The sandals were government surplus from the Vietnam War, the only war we ever lost, and during which Trout’s only child Leon had been a deserter.

Not anymore !

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.

“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.

I did not ask, but the surgical metaphor could not have been unfamiliar to him. Furthermore, life being the Darwinian experiment, or “crock of shit,” as Trout liked to call it, Roger himself had surely departed more than one tennis tournament having, like Skip, undergone a colostomy to his self-regard.

“Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity.

“There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France.

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

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. Many members of my generation are disappointed.

Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don’t do anything, don’t suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.

I of course understand that the widespread revulsion inspired even now, and perhaps forever, by the word Communism is a sane response to the cruelties and stupidities of the dictators of the USSR, who called themselves, hey presto, Communists, just as Hitler called himself, hey presto, a Christian.

Article XXX: Every person, upon reaching a statutory age of puberty, shall be declared an adult in a solemn public ritual, during which he or she must welcome his or her new responsibilities in the community, and their attendant dignities. Article XXXI: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone. Such essential elements in an ideal diet for a human spirit, of course, can be provided convincingly only by extended families.

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!