Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle

loisesya

He shuddered, 'Sometimes I wonder if he wasnt born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone cold dead.'

"Tell me,' I said a little later, 'in all your wide travels, have you found people everywhere about the same at heart?’ 'Hm?' asked Minton. ‘Do you find people to be about the same at heart, wherever you go?’ He looked at his wife, making sure she had heard the the question, then turned back to me. ‘About the same, wherever you go,’ he agreed. 'Um,' I said. 

Bokonon tells us, incidentally, that members of a duprass always die within a week of each other. When it came time for the Mintons to die, they did it within the same second. 

“When it fell, it would freeze into hard hobnails of ice-nine – and that would be the end of the world! And the end of the interview, too! Good-bye!"

Such music from such a woman could only be a case of schizophrenia or demonic possession. My hair stood on end, as though Angela were rolling on the floor, foaming at the mouth, and babbling fluent Babylonian. When the music was done, I shrieked at Julian Castle. who was transfixed, too, ‘My God-life! Who can under- stand even one little minute of it?' ‘Don't try' he said. ‘Just pretend you understand.’ ‘That's - that's very good advice.' I went limp. Castle quoted another poem: 

Men got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’

And the time of night and the cave and the waterfall - and the stone angel in Ilium.. And 250,000 cigarettes and 3,000 quarts of booze, and two wives and no wife... And no love waiting for me anywhere… And the listless life of an ink-stained hack... And Pabu, the moon, and Borasisi, the sun, and their children... All things conspired to form one cosmic vin-dit, one mighty shove into Bokononism, into the belief that God was running my life and that He had work for me to do. And, inwardly, I sarooned, which is to say that I acquiesced to the seeming demands of my vin-dit. Inwardly, I agreed to become the next President of San Lorenzo. 

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.

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