Vera had not sensed my approach. She was peering into the instrument and turning knobs with child-like seriousness and ineptitude. It was obvious that she had never used a microscope before.
I stole closer to her, and then I said, "Boo!"
She jerked her head away from the eyepiece.
"Hello," I said.
"You scared me to death," she said.
"Sorry," I said, and I laughed.
These ancient games go on and on. It's nice they do.
Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen--
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice--
So many different people
In the same device.
You were sick, but now you are well, and there is work to be done.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.There was a Japanese TV set in front of us. There were Japanese TV sets all over the prison. They were like portholes on an ocean liner. The passengers were in a state of suspended animation until the big ship got where it was going. But anytime they wanted, the passengers could look through a porthole and see the real world out there.
Life was like an ocean liner to a lot of people who weren't in prison, too, of course. And their TV sets were portholes through which they could look while doing nothing, to see all the World was doing with no help from them.
Look at it go!
I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.More raiders came down the stairs prodding the Reverend Dr. Lionel J. D. Jones, the Black Fuehrer, and Father Keeley before them.
Dr. Jones stopped halfway down the stairs, confronted his tormentors. 'All I've done, 'he said majestically, 'is do what you people should be doing.'
'What should we be doing?' said a G-man. He was obviously in command of the raid.
'Protecting the Republic,' said Jones. 'Why bother us? Everything we do is to make the country stronger! Join with us, and let's go after the people who are trying to make it weaker!'
'Who's that?' said the G-man.
'I have to tell you?' said Jones. 'Haven't you even found that in the course of your work? The Jews! The Catholics! The Negroes! The Orientals! The Unitarians! The foreign-born, who don't have any understanding of democracy, who play right into the hands of the socialists, the communists, the anarchists, the anti-Christs and the Jews!'
'For your information,' said the G-man in cool triumph, 'I am a Jew.'
'That proves what I've just been saying!' said Jones.
'How's that?', said the G-man.
'The Jews have infiltrated everything!' said Jones, smiling the smile of a logician who could never be topped.
'You talk about the Catholics and the Negroes-' said the G-man, 'and yet your two best friends are a Catholic and a Negro.'
'What's so mysterious about that?' said Jones.
'Don't you hate them?', said the G-man.
'Certainly not,' said Jones. 'We all believe the same basic thing.'
'What's that?' said the G-man.
'This once-proud country of ours is falling into the hands of wrong people,' said Jones. He nodded, and so did Father Keeley and the Black Fuehrer. 'And, before it gets back on the right track,' said Jones, 'some heads are going to roll.'
I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random.
I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.
Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information -
That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony -
That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase -
That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -
That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia -
That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.
El arte no es posible si no baila como pareja de la muerte, decía.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.Tags: slaughterhouse-five
And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"
It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it:
"Nothing.
My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child.
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