verbava все записи автора Kurt Vonnegut – Jailbird

Her second failure was as a wedding photographer. There was always an air of prewar doom about her photographs, which no retoucher could eradicate. It was as though the entire wedding party would wind up in the trenches or the gas chambers by and by.

***

"Think of the new era that is being born. The world has learned its lesson at last, at last. The closing chapter to ten thousand years of madness and greed is being written right here and now - in Nuremberg. Books will be written about it. Movies will be made about it. It's the most important turning point in history." I believed it.
"Walter," she said, "sometimes I think you are only eight years old."
"It's the only age to be," I said, "when a new era is being born."

***

He then quoted the harrowing thing that Jesus, according to Saint Matthew, had promised to say in the Person of God to sinners on Judgment Day.
This is it: "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."
These words appalled me then, and they appall me now. They are surely the inspiration for the notorious cruelty of Christians.
"Jesus may have said that," I told Larkin, "but it is so unlike most of what else He said that I have to conclude that He was slightly crazy that day."

***

It is a hard daydream to let go of - that one has friends.

***

I was incurious about the arrival of Virgil Greathouse. His arrival, like the arrival of any new prisoner, would be a public execution of sorts. I did not want to watch him or anybody become less than a man. So I was all alone in the supply room. I was grateful for the accident of privacy. I took advantage of it. I performed what was perhaps the most obscenely intimate physical act of my life. I gave birth to a broken, querulous little old man by doing this: by putting on my civilian clothes.

***

I congratulated him on having learned Chinese, and he replied that he could never do such a thing now. "I know too much now," he said. "I was too ignorant then to know how hard it was to learn Chinese. I thought it was like imitating birds. You know: You hear a bird make a sound, then you try to make a sound just like that, and see if you can't fool the bird."

***

I had been to the Arapahoe once before - in the autumn of Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. Fire had yet to be domesticated. Albert Einstein had predicted the invention of the wheel, but was unable to describe its probable shape and uses in the language of ordinary women and men. Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer, was President. The sale of alcoholic beverages was against the law, and I was a Harvard freshman.

***

"I feel so silly," said Sarah.
"You don't believe you're beautiful?" said her grandmother.
"I know I'm beautiful," said Sarah. "I look in a mirror, and I think, 'I'm beautiful.' "
"What's wrong, then?" said her grandmother.
"Beautiful is such a funny thing to be," said Sarah. "Somebody else is ugly, but I'm beautiful. Walter says I'm beautiful. You say I'm beautiful. I say I'm beautiful. Everybody says, 'Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,' and you start wondering what it is, and what's so wonderful about it."

***

"Money is so strange," she said. "Does it make any sense to you?"
"No," I said.
"The people who've got it, and the people who don't - " she mused. "I don't think anybody understands what's really going on."
"Some people must," I said. I no longer believe that.
I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders what is really going on.
We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans.

***

I had studied French for four years in a Cleveland public high school, by the way, but I never found anyone who spoke the dialect I learned out there. It may have been French as it was spoken by Iroquois mercenaries in the French and Indian War.

***
A waitress said to me, "Honeybunch, you sit right down, and I'll bring you your coffee right away." I hadn't said anything to her.
So I did sit down, and everywhere I looked I saw customers of every description being received with love. To the waitresses everybody was "honeybunch" and "darling" and "dear." It was like an emergency ward after a great catastrophe. It did not matter what race or class the victims belonged to. They were all given the same miracle drug, which was coffee. The catastrophe in this case, of course, was that the sun had come up again.

***

Noses are merciful that way. They will report that something smells awful. If the owner of a nose stays around anyway, the nose concludes that the smell isn't so bad after all. It shuts itself off, deferring to superior wisdom.

***

Mary Kathleen," I said, "you should know that I just got out of prison."
"Of course you did!" she said. "All the good people go to prison all the time."

***

And I am now compelled to wonder if wisdom has ever existed or can ever exist. Might wisdom be as impossible in this particular universe as a perpetual-motion machine?

***

"Hello and good-bye." What else is there to say? Our language is much larger than it needs to be.

***

We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one.

***

"You know what is finally going to kill this planet?" I said.
"Cholesterol!" said Frank Ubriaco.
"A total lack of seriousness," I said. "Nobody gives a damn anymore about what's really going on, what's going to happen next, or how we ever got into such a mess in the first place."

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