Galápagos

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Human beings had much bigger brains back then than they do today, and so they could be beguiled by mysteries. One such mystery in 1986 was how so many creatures which could not swim great distances had reached the Galápagos Islands, an archipelago of volcanic peaks due west of Guayaquil—separated from the mainland by one thousand kilometers of very deep water, very cold water fresh from the Antarctic. When human beings discovered those islands, there were already geckos and iguanas and rice rats and lava lizards and spiders and ants and beetles and grasshoppers and mites and ticks in residence, not to mention enormous land tortoises. What form of transportation had they used? Many people were able to satisfy their big brains with this answer: They came on natural rafts.

I love Kurt Vonnegut so much.

THERE WAS NO MYSTERY a million years ago as to how a thirty-five-year-old American male named James Wait, who could not swim a stroke, intended to get from the South American continent to the Galápagos Islands.

Amen

There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn’t imagine and execute.

Damn our big brains!

Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people’s actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be.

Kurt Vonnegut was a prophet

Whole nations were suddenly in the same situation as the San Mateo, unable to buy with their paper money and coins, or their written promises to pay later, even the barest essentials. Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizens as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for money. They were suddenly saying to people with nothing but paper representations of wealth, “Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think paper was so valuable?”

Love this book. Now Vunnegut gets a true financial global meltdown.

It was all in people’s heads. People had simply changed their opinions of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg.

Pathological personality. Unfortunately for the Hiroguchis, but not for Mandarax, which couldn’t feel anything or care about anything, the computer was not programed to explain that this was a rather mild affliction compared to most, and that those who had it were rarely hospitalized, that they were, in fact, among the happiest people on the planet—and that their behavior merely caused pain to those around them, and almost never to themselves.

Ha ha!