verbava все записи автора Foreword to "In the realms of the unreal: insane writings"
by Kurt Vonnegut
(pages ix--xi)

There was a time when clerical workers, if they were of a mind to, were allowed to put up funny or even impudent signs on walls near their desks, and such signs could be bought in what were then called "five and ten cent stores." One of these, I remember, was:

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS.

I may have seen that pre-fab joke for the first time at the Vonnegut Hardware Company in Indianapolis, where I used to work in the summertime in order to pay for clothes, dates, and petroleum. The store was owned by another branch of the family.

Then as now it was widely held that a person doing remarkably fresh work in the arts actually had to be crazy. What mentally healthy person could have thoughts that unusual? For a brief time, when my father was a boy, it was believed that there was a connection between tuberculosis and genius, since so many famous artists had TB. The early stages of syphilis were also rumored to be helpful. And E. B. White, the late writer and great editor of The New Yorker, said to me one time that he didn't know of any male author of quality who wasn't also a heavy drinker. And now, as though we needed any further proofs that creative persons are beneficiaries of disease, we have this volume of first-rate writings by the formerly or presently or since dead mentally ill, none of them, however, famous.

To me, though, and I have been in the writing business for a long time now, In the Realms of the Unreal proves only two things: first, that more good writing is being done than we can afford to publish and find time to read, and second, that creative people have thoughts unlike those of the general population because they have been culled or feel that they have been culled from that general population. The sequestering of some of us in mental hospitals is simply one of countless culling processes which are always going on. Tuberculosis or syphilis or a felony conviction or membership in a despised race or faction or a bad appearance or a rotten personality can get you culled as surely as a fancy nervous breakdown.

In order to be remarkably creative, though, it is not enough for a person to be culled or feel culled. He or she must also be gifted, as are all the contributors to this anthology. I have taught creative writing to all sorts of student bodies, ranging from those at Harvard University to teen-agers at a private school for the disturbed or learning disabled. I had thought that the percentage of persons with literary gifts is nearly the same for almost any sort of gathering. So why would that percentage, always a small one, be significantly higher or lower in a mental institution? Again: it is culling, whether real or illusory, rather than disease which is the source of inspiration. If it turns out that gifted people culled for mental illness have given the world more works of art worth saving than those culled for other reasons, that would make sense, since nobody can feel as steadily and alarmingly excluded from the general population. The rest of us make them the world's champions of loneliness. The word "egregious" (outside the herd) might have been coined for them.

As it is said: "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose." There find encapsulated the benefit to a gifted person of being culled. Having nothing left to lose frees people to think their own thoughts, since there is no longer anything to be gained by echoing the thoughts of those around them. Hopelessness is the mother of Originality.

And the three lovely daughters of Originality in turn, the granddaughters of Hopelessness, as this volume demonstrates, are Hope, and the Gratitude of Others, and Unshakable Self-Respect.

'cause thus spoke vonnegut