Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [66]
That was how he felt about death, he said.
That puts me in mind of a scene from a play of George Bernard Shaw’s, his manmade timequake Back to Methuselah. The whole play is ten hours long! The last time it was performed in its entirety was in 1922, the year I was born.
The scene: Adam and Eve, who have been around for a long time now, are waiting at the gate of their prosperous and peaceful and beautiful farm for the annual visit from their landlord, God. During every previous visit, and there have been hundreds of them by now, they could tell Him only that everything was nice and that they were grateful.
This time, though, Adam and Eve are all keyed up, scared but proud. They have something new they want to talk to God about. So God shows up, genial, big and hale and hearty, like my grandfather the brewer Albert Lieber. He asks if everything is satisfactory, and thinks He knows the answer, since what He has created is as perfect as He can make it.
Adam and Eve, more in love than they have ever been before, tell Him that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.
Chicago is a better city than New York because Chicago has alleys. The garbage doesn’t pile up on the sidewalks. Delivery vehicles don’t block main thoroughfares.
The late American novelist Nelson Algren said to the late Chilean novelist José Donoso, when we were all teaching in the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1966: “It must be nice to come from a country that long and narrow.”
You think the ancient Romans were smart? Look at how dumb their numbers were. One theory of why they declined and fell is that their plumbing was lead. The root of our word plumbing is plumbum, the Latin word for “lead.” Lead poisoning makes people stupid and lazy.
What’s your excuse?
I got a sappy letter from a woman a while back. She knew I was sappy, too, which is to say a northern Democrat. She was pregnant, and she wanted to know if it was a mistake to bring an innocent little baby into a world this bad.
I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably. They turned up in the most unexpected places. Perhaps you, dear reader, are or can become a saint for her sweet child to meet.
I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around!
Xanthippe thought her husband, Socrates, was a fool. Aunt Raye thought Uncle Alex was a fool. Mother thought Father was a fool. My wife thinks I’m a fool.
I’m wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I.
And Kilgore Trout said at the clambake, with Laurel and Hardy in a rowboat only fifty yards offshore, that young people liked movies with a lot of shooting because they showed that dying didn’t hurt at all, that people with guns could be thought of as “free-lance anesthetists.”
He was so happy! He was so popular! He was all dolled up in the tuxedo and boiled shirt and crimson cummerbund and bow tie that had belonged to Zoltan Pepper. I stood behind him in his suite in order to tie the tie for him, just as my big brother had done for me before I myself could tie a bow tie.
There on the beach, whatever Trout said produced laughter and applause. He couldn’t believe it! He said the pyramids and Stonehenge were built in a time of very feeble gravity, when boulders could be tossed around like sofa pillows, and people loved it. They begged for more. He gave them the line from “Kiss Me Again”: “There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time. Ting-a-ling?” People told him he was as witty as Oscar Wilde!
Understand, the biggest audience this man had had before the clambake was an artillery battery, when he was a forward spotter in Europe during World War Two.
“Ting-a-ling! If this