The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [1]
I found her answer so unexpectedly eloquent and poignant that I supposed it to be a quotation. I have since looked it up. It was written by Francis Bacon, and reads in full: “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”
Indeed, indeed!
Last summer I was sitting on the back porch of one of seven hostages I gave to fortune. This was right before sunset, so all shadows were long. We faced a pleasant but featureless meadow, not all of it his property, bounded by darkening woodland several hundred yards straight in front of us. And this former hostage, this pediatrician, this saxophonist and painter and writer and chess player, and father of two grown sons, said our children, meaning America’s children, were in those woods.
Mark Vonnegut, MD, who had to take a lot of pre-med courses before he got into med school, said the children would have to cross that unmarked meadow before they could join us on our porch as grownups. He said new technologies had removed all guide posts from the meadow, so it was no longer a simple matter to decide what to do with a life. And there were moreover landmines between them and us.
I said, “Doc, you were so crazy a third of a century ago. How come you’re so obviously OK now?”
And he said, “My case was a mild one.”
KURT VONNEGUT
April 30, 2002
New York City
PREFACE TO THE 2002 EDITION
IT’S EASY TO FORGET how intense the ’60s were.
If you had told the twelve-year-old boy who was me growing up on Cape Cod that Jack Kennedy would be shot and killed, that Martin Luther King and then Bobby Kennedy, all three bearing extraordinarily reasonable peaceful messages of hope and change, would also be shot and killed, that my father, whom I knew principally as a guy who muttered over a typewriter and sometimes tipped over the chess board if there was no better move, would become a counterculture hero, and that I, myself, would have a BA in religion, a full beard, and hair halfway down my back and set out to establish a self-sufficient commune twelve miles by boat from the nearest road or electric light in the Coast Range of British Columbia I would have doubted your sanity.
Over and over, the hopes and dreams and chances of many in my generation for any kind of ease or routine went from bad to worse. We did the best we could.
National Guard troops really did fire on and kill college students.
There was an ever-widening range of what might happen next. We did the best we could.
Most of our parents and professors, who were experiencing all this newness and trauma at the same time we were, lost confidence they had advice or help worth giving.
We truly didn’t know that drugs were bad for you. How could we have known for sure that drugs weren’t good? For many of us experimenting with drugs was more a matter of covering all the bases in a search for what might be helpful and positive. Getting high or escaping was not the point.
It wasn’t that hard to live without electricity and other conveniences on next to no money. I loved working sun up to sun down building a house, cutting firewood, and making a garden. Even if I didn’t really know how to do these things, and made many laughable mistakes, it was a welcome change from arguing about how to end war, and racism, and poverty. And I didn’t have to worry that my efforts were somehow subsidizing death and destruction. The biggest problems were boredom and getting along with the other people.
By the time I started hearing voices, ten years later, it was just one more thing. I assumed that everyone was hearing voices. I asked someone on the couch next to me, “So what do your voices tell you?” They got up and walked away.
At the time I would have endorsed the radical notions of R. D. Laing that insanity was a sane reaction to an insane society. Leaving the insane society to set up an independent self-sufficient