| UCK
AR I brought my last Vonnegut book to read while substituting today. Now I'll have to buy more. It was Cat's Cradle, incidentally, the one with ice-nine. It may or may not be Kurt Vonnegut's greatest book. Technically speaking, ice-nine a form of ice that melts at 114.4 degrees Farenheit because of its special way of stacking and locking water molecules. If ice-nine touches ordinary water, it instantly converts the water into more ice-nine, however wide the reach of the water in question. Breakfast of Champions had a similar plot device: plastic. Plastic is a polymer, a molecule whose structure extends out in infinite repetition. In one minor plot arc, polymer-heavy industrial runoff begins to flood a cave of natural and manmade curiosities with sludge carrying bubbles "as tough as ping-pong balls" filled with vile-smelling gas. Vonnegut ties polymer to the bulk of human endeavors, adequately signifying both with stone-fonted "ETC." Slaughterhouse-Five didn't have a perpetuating device like that, persay, but the main character was "unstuck in time," moving randomly and uncontrollably through different moments in his own life. He could change nothing about his life -- no one could -- because every moment was structured to make every event happen. Infinite procession, zero progression. Meaningless, fundamentally unchanging repetition, forever. Vonnegut's writings would be depressing if all you looked at was the big picture. There's an exchange between two characters in Cat's Cradle that defines the major ways of looking at it. A midget and a doctor both find life meaningless. The midget stands on a waterfall cliff and paints a picture: a cat's cradle, his symbol for how adults make up meaningless lies and have for thousands of generations. He likes what he's made, and for the record he's a dignified, decent individual. The doctor comes along, realizes and embellishes the importance of the painting, picks it up and frisbees it off the cliff. Everything is without meaning to him, up to and including the picture that illustrated it. The midget stands dumbstruck at the senseless loss of the nice little thing he made. The moral of Vonnegut's stories seems to be that the big things are non-controlled by chaotic forces that simply exist without overall purpose. Because of that, one can either make/do something personally fun and worthwhile in a world that isn't, recognizing and enjoying most of all the moments when you're happy, or surrender oneself to extinction, nihilism and/or the will of another. That's the moral I got from them, anyway. I thought it was certainly a worthwhile message, even one worth passing around. Then along came Timequake. The premise of that one, his last novel, written in 1996, is that a timequake caused by a hesitating shudder in the expansion of the universe has knocked everything in creation back from early 2001 to early 1991. Everyone in the world is bound inexorably to repeat absolutely everything they ever did over those ten years. No free will there. When everyone gets back to the exact moment of the timequake and free will kicks in again, they're overcome with Post-Timequake Apathy (PTA) and fall flat on their faces or otherwise cease functioning. After ten whole years of having no control over what they did, they had "stopped giving a shit what was going on, or what was liable to happen next." Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's recurring alter-ego character, is one of the first on Earth to realize what had happened. He runs around forcing people to get up so they won't simply give up and die wherever they flopped over. He tries to rouse one man by insisting that he has free will again. Trout only succeeds when he tells the man, "You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do." The man gets up and starts spreading the mantra to others: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do." Soon everyone is up and moving again, repeating to whomever they find still in the mental slog of Post-Timequake Apathy, "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do." And how about that, people get up and start living their lives for real. Infinite procession causing progression. No more meaningless, fundamentally unchanging repetition, necessarily. Free will mattered again so one was free to find meaning again in one's familiar, yet not endlessly repeating, time on Earth. People like something better when they know it's going to end sometime. We hate being bored; we like finding joy. So find it. And don't be an asshole in the meantime. Our time in these meat engines, the little things we like and our interpersonal connections are all we really have, so don't go around depriving people of theirs. That's the real moral of Kurt Vonnegut. |