Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [4]
I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, “The Beatles did.”
It appears to me that the most highly evolved Earthling creatures find being alive embarrassing or much worse. Never mind cases of extreme discomfort, such as idealists’ being crucified. Two important women in my life, my mother and my only sister, Alice, or Allie, in Heaven now, hated life and said so. Allie would cry out, “I give up! I give up!”
The funniest American of his time, Mark Twain, found life for himself and everybody else so stressful when he was in his seventies, like me, that he wrote as follows: “I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood.” That is in an essay on the sudden death of his daughter Jean a few days earlier. Among those he wouldn’t have resurrected were Jean, and another daughter, Susy, and his beloved wife, and his best friend, Henry Rogers.
Twain didn’t live to see World War One, but still he felt that way.
Jesus said how awful life was, in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are they that.mourn,” and “Blessed are the meek,” and “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.”
Henry David Thoreau said most famously, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
So it is not one whit mysterious that we poison the water and air and topsoil, and construct ever more cunning doomsday devices, both industrial and military. Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can’t come soon enough.
My father, Kurt Senior, an Indianapolis architect who had cancer, and whose wife had committed suicide some fifteen years earlier, was arrested for running a red light in his hometown. It turned out that he hadn’t had a driver’s license for twenty years!
You know what he told the arresting officer? “So shoot me,” he said.
The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it: “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!”
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, “being alive is a crock of shit.”
2
Imagine this: A great American university gives up football in the name of sanity. It turns its vacant stadium into a bomb factory. So much for sanity. Shades of Kilgore Trout.
I am speaking of my alma mater, the University of Chicago. In December of 1942, long before I got there, the first chain reaction of uranium on Earth was compelled by scientists underneath the stands of Stagg Field. Their intent was to demonstrate the feasibility of an atomic bomb. We were at war with Germany and Japan.
Fifty-three years later, on August 6th, 1995, there was a gathering in the chapel of my university to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the detonation of the first atomic bomb, over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. I was there.
One of the speakers was the physicist Leo Seren. He had participated in the successful experiment under the lifeless sports facility so long ago. Get this: He apologized for having done that!
Somebody should have told him that being a physicist, on a planet where the smartest animals hate being alive so much, means never having to say you’re sorry.
Now imagine this: A man creates a hydrogen bomb for a paranoid Soviet Union, makes sure it will work, and then wins a Nobel Peace Prize! This real-life character, worthy of a story by Kilgore Trout, was the late physicist Andrei Sakharov.
He won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his.