God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [27]
Of this technique Eliot often said: "Nobody believes it until she tries it. Once she finds out it works, she never wants to quit."
In the back of the ledger was a very unfinished novel which Eliot had begun years before, on an evening when he understood at last that Sylvia would never come back to him.
Why do so many souls voluntarily return to Earth after failing and dying, failing and dying, failing and dying there? Because Heaven is such a null. Over Dem Pearly Gates these words should be emblazoned:
A LITTLE NOTHING, O GOD, GOES A LONG, LONG WAY.
But the only words written on the infinite portal of Paradise are the grafitti of vandal souls. "Welcome to the Bulgarian World's Fair!" says a penciled plaint on a pediment of pearl. "Better red than dead," another opines.
"You ain't a man till you've had black meat," suggests another. And this has been revised to read, "You ain't a man till you've been black meat."
"Where can I get a good lay around here?" asks a bawdy soul, drawing this reply: "Try 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' by Alfred, Lord Tennyson."
My own contribution:
Those who write on Heaven's walls Should mold their shit in little balls. And those who read these lines of wit Should eat these little balls of shit.
"Kublai Khan, Napoleon, Julius Caesar and King Richard the Lion Hearted all stink," a brave soul declares. The claim is unchallenged, nor are challenges from the parties insulted likely. The immortal soul of Kublai Khan now inhabits the meek meat of a veterinarian's wife in Lima, Peru. The immortal soul of Bonaparte peers out from the hot and stuffy meat of the fourteen-year-old son of the Harbor Master of Cotuit, Massachusetts. Great Caesar's ghost manages as best it can with the syphilitic meat of a Pygmy widow in the Andaman Islands. Coeur de Lion has found himself once again taken captive during his travels, imprisoned this time in the flesh of Coach Letzinger, a pitiful exhibitionist and freelance garbage man in Rosewater, Indiana. Coach, with poor old King Richard inside, goes to Indianapolis on the Greyhound bus three or four times a year, dresses up for the trip in shoes, socks, garters, a raincoat, and a chromium-plated whistle hung around his neck. When he gets to Indianapolis, Coach goes to the silverware department of one of the big stores, where there are always a lot of brides-to-be picking out silver patterns. Coach blows his whistle, all the girls look, Coach throws open his raincoat, closes it again, and runs like hell to catch the bus back to Rosewater.
Heaven is the bore of bores, Eliot's novel went on, so most wraiths queue up to be reborn—and they live and love and fail and die, and they queue up to be reborn again. They take pot luck, as the saying goes. They don't gibber and squeak to be one race or another, one sex or another, one nationality or another, one class or another. What they want and what they get are three dimensions—and comprehensible little packets of time—and enclosures making possible the crucial distinction between inside and outside.
There is no inside here. There is no outside here. To pass through the gates in either direction is to go from nowhere to nowhere and from everywhere to everywhere. Imagine a billiard table as long and broad as the Milky Way. Do not omit the detail of its being a flawless slate slab to which green felt has been glued. Imagine a gate at dead center on the slab. Anyone imagining that much will have comprehended all there is to know about Paradise—and will have sympathized with those becoming ravenous for the distinction between inside and outside.
Uncomfortable as it is here, however, there are a few of us who do not care to be reborn. I am among that number. I have not been on Earth since 1587