Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [50]
“The wheel that squeaks the loudest gets the oil,” he said.
He realized the absurdity of what he was doing, he said, only when, as he took a painting down from the wall, preparing to hit the alarm with a corner of the frame, the alarm fell silent of its own accord.
He hung up the painting again, and even made sure it was hanging straight. “That seemed somehow important, that the picture was nice and straight,” he said, “and evenly spaced from the others. At least I could make that little part of the chaotic Universe exactly as it should be. I was grateful for the opportunity to do that.”
He returned to the entrance hall, expecting the armed guard to be awakening from his torpor. But Dudley Prince was still a statue, still convinced that, if he budged, he would find himself back in prison again.
Trout again confronted him, saying, “Wake up! Wake up! You’ve got free will again, and there’s work to do!” And so on.
Nothing.
Trout had an inspiration! Instead of trying to sell the concept of free will, which he himself didn’t believe in, he said this: “You’ve been very sick! Now you’re well again. You’ve been very sick! Now you’re well again.”
That mantra worked!
Trout could have been a great advertising man. The same has been said of Jesus Christ. The basis of every great advertisement is a credible promise. Jesus promised better times in an afterlife. Trout was promising the same thing in the here and now.
Dudley Prince’s spiritual rigor mortis began to thaw! Trout hastened his recovery by telling him to snap his fingers and stamp his feet, and stick out his tongue and wiggle his butt, and so on.
Trout, who had never even earned a High School Equivalency Certificate, had nonetheless become a real-life Dr. Frankenstein!
47
Uncle Alex Vonnegut, who said we should exclaim out loud whenever we were accidentally happy, was considered a fool by his wife, Aunt Raye. He certainly started out as a fool when a spanking-new freshman at Harvard. Uncle Alex was asked to explain in an essay why he had come to Harvard all the way from Indianapolis. By his own gleeful account, he wrote, “Because my big brother is at MIT.”
He never had a kid, and never owned a gun. He owned a lot of books, though, and kept buying new ones, and giving me those he thought were particularly well done. It was an ordeal for him to find this book or that one, so he could read some particularly magical passage aloud to me. Here’s why: His wife Aunt Raye, who was said to be artistic, arranged his library according to the size and color of the volumes, and stairstep style.
So he might say of a collection of essays by his hero H. L. Mencken, “I think it was green, and about this high.”
His sister, my aunt Irma, said to me one time when I was a grownup, “All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.” Her two brothers were sure as heck scared of her.
Listen: A Harvard education for my Uncle Alex wasn’t the trophy of a micromanaged Darwinian victory over others that it is today. His father, the architect Bernard Vonnegut, sent him there in order that he might become civilized, which he did indeed become, although fabulously henpecked, and nothing more than a life insurance salesman.
I am eternally grateful to him, and indirectly to what Harvard used to be, I suppose, for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else may be going on.
It now appears that books in the form so beloved by Uncle Alex and me, hinged and unlocked boxes, packed with leaves speckled by ink, are obsolescent. My grandchildren are already doing much of their reading from words projected on the face of a video screen.
Please, please, please wait just a minute!
At the time of their invention, books were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, albeit fabricated from scarcely modified substances found in forest and field and animals, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation,