Posts tagged Books
Posts tagged Books
‘In the beginning there was absolutely nothing, and I mean NOTHING…but nothing implies something, just as up implies down and sweet implies sour, as man implies woman and drunk implies sober and happy implies sad. I hate to tell you this, friends and neighbors, but we are teensy-weensy implications in an enormous implication. If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to where you came from?
The first something to be implied by all the nothing was in fact two somethings, who were God and Satan. God was male. Satan was female. They implied each other, and hence were peers in the emerging power structure, which was itself nothing but an implication. Power was implied by weakness.
God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Satan could have done this herself, but she thought it was stupid, action for the sake of action. What was the point? She didn’t say anything at first.
But Satan began to worry about God when He said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. She had to wonder ‘What in the heck does He think He’s doing? How far does He intend to go, does He expect me to help Him take care of all this crazy stuff?’
And then the shit really hit the fan. God made man and woman, beautiful little miniatures of Him and her, and turned them loose to see what might become of them. The Garden of Eden might be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games.
Satan couldn’t undo anything God had done. She could at least try to make existence for His little toys less painful. She could see what He couldn’t: To be alive was to be either bored or scared stiff. So she filled an apple with all sorts of ideas that might at least relieve the boredom, such as rules for games with cards and dice, and how to fuck, and recipes for beer and wine and whiskey, and pictures of different plants that were smokeable, and so on. And instructions on how to make music and sing and dance real crazy, real sexy. And how to spout blasphemy when they stubbed their toes.
Satan had a serpent give Eve the apple. Eve took a bite and handed it to Adam. He took a bite, and they fucked.
I grant you that some of the ideas in the apple had catastrophic side effects for a minority of those who tried them…All Satan wanted to do was help, and she did in many cases. And her record for promoting nostrums with occasionally dreadful side effects is no worse than that of the most reputable pharmaceutical houses of the present day.
My uncle Alex Vonnegut…taught me something very important. He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it.
He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.
Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’
When you’re an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.
Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving any more. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward - and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose - because it contains all the others - the fact that they were the people who created the phrase “to MAKE money.” No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity - to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words “to make money” hold the essence of human morality.
Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide - as, I think, he will.
Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips, and guns - or dollars. Take your choice - there is no other - and your time is running out.
I’ve never felt the urge to jump off a bridge, but there are times I have wanted to jump,
Out of my life,
Out of my skin.
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
Still and all, why bother? Here’s MY answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them.
You are not alone.’
I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively.
I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.
The next morning was a Monday. The snow stopped, the sun rose. The temperature hovered below zero.
Mother said “About time you got off to school, isn’t it Edward?”“I guess it is,” he said, no questions asked. Which is just the kind of boy he was.
After breakfast he climbed down from the tree and walked six miles to the little schoolhouse. Saw a man frozen in a block of ice on his way there. About froze himself, too—didn’t, though. He made it. He was a couple of minutes early, in fact.
And there was his schoolmaster, sitting on a wood pile, reading. All he could see of the schoolhouse was the weather vane, the rest of it buried beneath the weekend’s snowfall.
“Morning, Edward,” he said.
“Morning,” Edward said.
And then he remembered: he’d forgotten his homework.
Went back to get it.
True Story.
