Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [10]
I reflected sadly that night, with Lily pretending to be a dead grownup, that I would be seventy-eight when she graduated from high school, and eighty-two when she graduated from college, and so on. Talk about remembering the future!
What hit me really hard that night, though, was the character Emily’s farewell in the last scene, after the mourners have gone back down the hill to their village, having buried her. She says, “Good-by, good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”
I myself become a sort of Emily every time I hear that speech. I haven’t died yet, but there is a place, as seemingly safe and simple, as learnable, as acceptable as Grover’s Corners at the turn of the century, with ticking clocks and Mama and Papa and hot baths and new-ironed clothes and all the rest of it, to which I’ve already said good-by, good-by, one hell of a long time ago now.
Here’s what that was: the first seven years of my life, before the shit hit the fan, first the Great Depression and then World War Two.
They say the first thing to go when you’re old is your legs or your eyesight. It isn’t true. The first thing to go is parallel parking.
Now I find myself maundering about parts of plays hardly anybody knows or cares about anymore, such as the graveyard scene in Our Town, or the poker game in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, or what Willy Loman’s wife said after that tragically ordinary, clumsily gallant American committed suicide in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
She said, “Attention must be paid.”
In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois said as she was taken away to a madhouse, after she was raped by her sister’s husband, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Those speeches, those situations, those people, became emotional and ethical landmarks for me in my early manhood, and remain such in the summer of 1996. That is because I was immobilized in a congregation of rapt fellow human beings in a theater when I first saw and heard them.
They would have made no more impression on me than Monday Night Football, had I been alone eating nachos and gazing into the face of a cathode-ray tube.
In the early days of television, when there were only half a dozen channels at most, significant, well-written dramas on a cathode-ray tube could still make us feel like members of an attentive congregation, alone at home as we might be. There was a high probability back then, with so few shows to choose from, that friends and neighbors were watching the same show we were watching, still finding TV a whizbang miracle.
We might even call up a friend that very night, and ask a question to which we already knew the answer: “Did you see that? Wow!”
No more.
7
I wouldn’t have missed the Great Depression or my part in World War Two for anything. Trout asserted at the clambake that our war would live forever in show biz, as other wars would not, because of the uniforms of the Nazis.
He commented unfavorably on the camouflage suits our own generals wear nowadays on TV, when they describe our blasting the bejesus out of some Third World country because of petroleum. “I can’t imagine,” he said, “any part of the world where such garish pajamas would make a soldier less rather than more visible.
“We are evidently preparing,” he said, “to fight World War Three in the midst of an enormous Spanish omelet.”
He asked what relatives of mine had been wounded in wars. As far as I knew, only one. That was my great-grandfather Peter Lieber, an immigrant who became a brewer in Indianapolis after being wounded in one leg during our Civil