Date read: October 2020
How strongly would I recommend? 7/10
Lasting Thoughts
This book is filled with little nuggets of wisdom. Vonnegut has a way of dispelling some of the big questions of life into digestible ideas. His idea of how to live a good life boils down to: Be Kind and Find a Community to contribute to. He argues that two people with kids is not enough people for a family. We need a variety of people in our life so we don’t expect too much from any one person.
Most Memorable Quote
When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
Kurt Vonnegut
For reference:
The bold highlights are my own emphasis
The blue highlights are passages I found notable or interesting
Introduction (by Dan Wakefield)
As Eastern meditations such as Zen became a fad, Vonnegut maintained that we had our own Western method for achieving the same results of slowing the heartbeat and stilling the mind; it was called “reading short stories.”
— He called this practice, “Buddhist Catnaps.”
“The function of an artist is to make people like life better than before.”
— When asked if he’d ever seen that done he answered, “Yes, the Beatles did it.”
In the way he spoke and the way he wrote, Vonnegut was always coming up with the plain-spoken words and phrases that people thought but didn’t say, the ideas that expressed inner feelings, that rattled preconceptions and made you look at things from a different angle.
“When my children complain about the planet to me, I say, ‘Shut up! I just got here myself. Who do you think I am—Methuselah? You think I like the news of the day any better than you do? You’re wrong.’”
Vonnegut wrote that “a writer is first and foremost a teacher.”
“There’s only one rule I know of —Goddam it, you’ve got to be kind.”
“You know, Dan, we never had to leave home to be writers, because there are people there just as part and just as dumb, just as kind and just as mean, as anywhere else in the world.”
If your destiny was not to live and work in a big city or a foreign land, it was just as important and admirable, in Vonnegut’s view, to serve the place where you found yourself and felt yourself fulfilled, no matter how small or obscured the place might seem to the rest of the world.
— “I am certain you are highly valued and badly needed right where you are. That must be a nourishing situation. If you move East, you may find that life becomes a lot less personal.”
“… if you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn they are not sexy and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg people to be kinder and more responsible they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hard-working men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.”
Ch 1 – How to make money and find love!
One sort of optional thing you might do is to realize there are six seasons instead of four. The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are so depressed so much of the time. I mean, Spring doesn’t feel like Spring a lot of time, and November is all wrong for Fall and so on. Here is the truth about the seasons: Spring is May and June! What could be springier than May and June? Summer is July and August. Really hot, right? Autumn is September and October. See the pumpkins? Smell those burning leaves.
— Next comes the season called “Locking.” That is when nature shuts everything down. November and December aren’t Winter. They’re Locking. Next comes winter, January and February. Boy! Are they ever cold! What comes next? Not Spring. Unlocking comes next. What else could April be?
When I came home to Indianapolis from the Second World War in Germany, an uncle of mind said to me, “By golly—you look like a man now.” I wanted to strangle him. If I had, he would have been the first German I’d killed. I was a man before I went to war, but he was damned if he would say so.
People who can do those things well, as you can, are miracles and, in my opinion, entitle us to suspect that we may be civilized after all. It is terribly hard to learn to read and write. It takes simply forever.
— Try it [teaching someone to read & write] sometime, and you will discover that it is nearly impossible.
No matter what age and of us is now, we are going tome bored and lonely during what remains of our lives. We are so lonely because we don’t have enough friends or relatives. Human beings are supposed to live in stable, like-minded, extended family of fifty people or more.
— Marriage is collapsing because our families are too small. A man cannot be a whole society to a woman, and a woman cannot be a whole society to a man. We try, but it is scarcely surprising that so many of us go to pieces.
—– So I recommend that everybody here join in all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.
The members of your graduating class are not sleepy, are not listless, anon apathetic. They are simply performing the experiment of doing without hate. Hate is the missing vitamin or mineral or whatever in their diet, they have sensed correctly that hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide. This is a very exciting they they are doing, and I wish them well.
Ch 2 – Advice to graduating women (that all men should know!)
A computer teaches a child what a computer can become. An educated human being teaches a child what a child can become.
Teaching, I may say, is the noblest profession of all in democracy. Some of you will become mothers. I don’t recommend it, but these things happen.
— And keep that kid the hell away from computers and TV sets, unless you want it to be a lonesome imbecile, who steals money from your purse so it can buy stuff.
Don’t give up on books. They feel so good—they friendly heft. The sweet reluctance of their pages when you turn them with your sensitive fingertips. A large part of our brains is devoted to deciding whether what our hands are touching is good or bad for us. Any brain worth a nickel knows books are good for us.
But about my Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now. One of the things he found objectionable about human beings was they so rarely noticed it when they were happy.
— He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
—– So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
Ch 3 – How to have something most billionaires don’t
We were at a party thrown by a multi-billionaire out on Long Island, and I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch-22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed worldwide over the past forty years?
Joe said to me, “I have something he can never have.”
I said, ‘What’s that, Joe?”
And he said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Mark Twain, at the end of a profoundly meaningful life, for which he never received the Nobel Prize, asked himself what it was we all lived for. He came up with six words that satisfied him. They satisfy me, too. They should satisfy you:
— “The good opinion of our neighbours.”
—– Neighbours are people who know you, can see you, can talk to you—whom you may have had been of some help of beneficial stimulation.
—– To earn their good opinions, you should apply the special skills you have learned in college, and meet the standards of decency and honor and fair play set by exemplary books and elders.
Ch 5 – How music cures our ills (and there are a lot of them)
When you get to my age, if you get to my age, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about.
Dr. Vonnegut said to this to his differing old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.
— I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.
[British historian Edward Gibbon] “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”
… we are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
She was about to have a baby, not mine. She wanted to know if it was a mistake to bring an innocent little baby into a world as awful as this one is. I told her that what made life almost worth living for me was the saints I met. These were people who behaved compassionately and capably, not matter what, and they could be anywhere.
— So maybe some of you tonight are or may become saints for her child to meet. Most of us are loaded with Original Sin. But a surprising number of us, not me, God knows, are loaded with Original Virtue. Ain’t that sweet?
Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
Ch 7 – What the “Ghost Dance” of the native Americans and the french painters who let the cubist movement have in common.
Despite my inability to o’er-leap the intellectual barrier of thermodynamics, or pile of shit, if you like, I still wanted to be respected as a person who thought scientifically, who loved the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It was obvious that only a pseudoscience was a possibility for me. Ideally, I thought, it should be a pseudoscience socially superior to astrology, meteorology, hairdressing, economics, or embalming.
— The two most prominent such, then as now, were psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. Both were based, then as now, on what had regularly sent innocent persons to the electric chair or the hot squat, which is human testimony, which is blah-blah-blah.
The leadership of both the Ghost Dance and the Cubist movement had these elements in common:
1. A charismatic, gifted leader who described cultural changes which should be made;
2. Two or more respected citizen who testified that this leader was not a lunatic, but was well worth listening to;
3. A glib, personable explainer, who told the general public what the leader was up to, why he was so wonderful, and so on, day after day.
Dostoyevsky suggested that one sacred memory from childhood was perhaps the best education. I say to you that one plausible, romantic theory about humanity is perhaps the best prize you can take away from a university.
My politics in a nutshell: let’s stop giving corporations and newfangled contraptions what they need, and get back to giving human beings what we need.
We all get the mineral and vitamins we need. Is it conceivable that we are suffering from a cultural deficiency which we can remedy? Friends and neighbours, I say YES to that.
— Yes, and let’s find a way to get ourselves and others extended families again. A husband and a wife and some kids aren’t a family, any more than a Diet Pepsi and three Oreos is a breakfast. Twenty, thirty, forty people—that’s a family. Marriages are all busting up. Why? Mates are saying to each other, because they’re human, “You’re not enough people for me.”
— Yes, and let’s make sure every American gets a puberty ceremony, an impressive welcome to the rights and duties of grown-ups. As matters now stand, only practicing Jews get those. The only way the rest of us can feel like grown-ups is to get pregnant or get somebody else pregnant or commit a felony or go to war and then come back again.
Ch 8 – How I learned from a teacher what artists do
A husband, a wife, and some kinds is not a family; it’s a terribly vulnerable survival unit. Now those of you who get married or are married, when you fight with your spouse, what each of you will be saying to the other one actually is, “You’re not enough people. You’re only one person. I should have hundreds of people around.”
The teacher whose name I mentioned when we all remembered good teachers asked me one time, “What is it artists do?” And I mumbled something.
— “They do two things,” he said. “First, they admit they can’t straighten out the whole universe. And then second, they make at least one little part of it exactly as it should be. A blob of clay, a square of canvas, a piece of paper, or whatever.” We have all worked so hard and well to make these moments and this place exactly what it should be.
Ch 9 – Don’t forget where you come from
Some of you won’t stay home. But please don’t forget where you came from. I never did.
Notice when you’re happy, and know when you’ve got enough.
As for throwing money at problems: that’s what money is for.
I suggest to you Adams and Eves that you set as your goals the putting of some small part of the planet into something safe and sane and decent order.
There’s a lot of cleaning up to do.
There’s a lot of rebuilding to do, both spiritual and physical.
And, again, there’s going to be a lot of happiness. Don’t forget to notice!
Unstuck in Time — Quotes to ponder
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“We have to be constantly jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem.
Kurt Vonnegut
Do it as well as you possibly can.
You will get an enormous reward.
You will have created something.”
“When things go well for days on end, it is a hilarious accident.”
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to maintain it.”
“Make love when you can. It’s good for you.”
“Queer travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
“There is only one rule that I know of, babies—, Goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
“A sane person in an insane society must appear insane.”
“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
“I’m a space wanderer named Kurt.”
“So it goes …”
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