Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [0]
Title Page
Epigraph
Praise
1 - BETWEEN TIMID AND TIMBUKTU
2 - CHEERS IN THE WIREHOUSE
3 - UNITED HOTCAKE PREFERRED
4 - TENT RENTALS
5 - LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN HERO
6 - A DESERTER IN TIME OF WAR
7 - VICTORY
8 - IN A HOLLYWOOD NIGHT CLUB
9 - A PUZZLE SOLVED
UNK, TURN SHIP UPSIDE DOWN.
10 - AN AGE OF MIRACLES
I WAS A VICTIM OF A SERIES OF ACCIDENTS, AS ARE WE ALL.
11 - WE HATE MALACHI CONSTANT BECAUSE ...
12 - THE GENTLEMAN FROM TRALFAMADORE
EPILOGUE: REUNION WITH STONY
BOOKS BY KURT VONNEGUT
Copyright Page
FOR ALEX VONNEGUT, SPECIAL AGENT, WITH LOVE
"Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules—and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress."
—RANSOM K. FERN
All persons, places, and events in this book are real. Certain speeches and thoughts are necessarily constructions by the author. No names have been changed to protect the innocent, since God Almighty protects the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.
AMERICA’S GREATEST SATIRIST KURT VONNEGUT IS...
"UNIQUE ... one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best."
—DORIS LESSING
The New York Times Book Review
"OUR FINEST BLACK-HUMORIST. ... We laugh in self-defense."
—The Atlantic Monthly
"AN UNIMITATIVE AND INIMITABLE SOCIAL SATIRIST."
—Harper’s Magazine
"A MEDICINE MAN, CONJURING UP FANTASIES TO WARN THE WORLD."
—The Charlotte Observer
"A CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION."
—Chicago Sun-Times
"A LAUGHING PROPHET OF DOOM."
—The New York Times
1
BETWEEN TIMID AND TIMBUKTU
"I guess somebody up there likes me."
—MALACHI CONSTANT
EVERY ONE NOW KNOWS how to find the meaning of life within himself.
But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.
They could not name even one of the fifty-three portals to the soul.
Gimcrack religions were big business.
Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward—pushed ever outward. 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.
Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.
It flung them like stones.
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.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.
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?
The following is a true story from the Nightmare Ages, falling roughly, give or take a few years, between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression.
There was a crowd.
The crowd had gathered because there was to be a materialization. A man and his dog were going to materialize, were going to appear out of thin air—wispily at first, becoming, finally, as substantial as any man and dog alive.
The crowd wasn’t going to get to see the materialization. The materialization was strictly a private affair on private property, and the crowd was emphatically not invited to feast its eyes.
The materialization was going to take place, like a modern, civilized hanging, within high, blank, guarded walls. And the crowd outside the walls was very much like a crowd outside the walls at a hanging.
The crowd knew it wasn’t going to see anything, yet its members found pleasure in being near, in staring at the blank walls and imagining what was happening inside. The mysteries of the materialization, like the mysteries of a hanging, were enhanced by the wall; were made pornographic by the magic lantern slides