Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [26]
Yesterday, Wednesday, July 3rd, 1996, I received a well-written letter from a man who never asked to be born in the first place, and who has been a captive of our nonpareil correctional facilities, first as a juvenile offender and then as an adult offender, for many years. He is about to be released into a world where he has no friends or relatives. Free will is about to kick in again, after a hiatus of a good deal more than a decade. What should he do?
I, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, wrote back today, “Join a church.” I said this because what such a grown-up waif needs more than anything is something like a family.
I couldn’t recommend Humanism for such a person. I wouldn’t do so for the great majority of the planet’s population.
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can’t.
Voltaire, French author of Candide, and therefore the Humanists’ Abraham, concealed his contempt for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church from his less educated, simpler-minded, and more frightened employees, because he knew what a stabilizer their religion was for them.
With some trepidation, I told Trout in the summer of 2001 about my advice to the man soon to be expelled from prison. He asked if I had heard from this person again, if I knew what had become of him in the intervening five years, or in the intervening ten years, if we wanted to count the rerun. I hadn’t and didn’t.
He asked if I myself had ever tried to join a church, just for the hell of it, to find out what that was like. He had. The closest I ever came to that, I said, was when my second-wife-to-be, Jill Krementz, and I thought it would be cute, and also ritzy, to be married in the Little Church Around the Corner, a Disneyesque Episcopal house of worship on East Twenty-ninth Street off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
“When they found out I was a divorced person,” I said, “they prescribed all sorts of penitent services I was to perform before I was clean enough to be married there.”
“There you are,” said Trout. “Imagine all the chickenshit you’d have to go through if you were an ex-con. And if that poor son of a bitch who wrote you really did find a church to accept him, he could easily be back in prison.”
“For what?” I said. “For robbing the poor box?”
“No,” said Trout, “for delighting Jesus Christ by shooting dead a doctor coming to work in an abortion mill.”
22
I forget what I was doing on the afternoon of February 13th, 2001, when the timequake struck. It couldn’t have been much. I sure as heck wasn’t writing another book. I was seventy-eight, for heaven’s sakes! My daughter Lily was eighteen!
Old Kilgore Trout was still writing, though. Seated on his cot at the shelter, where everybody thought his name was Vincent van Gogh, he had just begun a story about a working-class Londoner, Albert Hardy, also the name of the story. Albert Hardy was born in 1896, with his head between his legs, and his genitalia sprouting out of the top of his neck, which looked “like a zucchini.”
Albert’s parents taught him to walk on his hands and eat with his feet. That was so they could conceal his private parts with trousers. The private parts weren’t excessively large like the testicles of the fugitive in Trout’s father’s Ting-a-ling parable. That wasn’t the point.
Monica Pepper was at her desk next door, only feet away, but they still hadn’t met. She and Dudley Prince and her husband still believed the depositor of stories in the trash receptacle out front was an old woman, so she couldn’t possibly live next door. Their best guess was that she came from the shelter for battered old people over on Convent Avenue, or the detox center in the parish house down at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, which was unisex.
Monica’s own