Maybe that's why I felt the need to write this. To somehow make what I've soaked up tangible and [semi-]permanent. Otherwise I feel like it's lost and forgotten. What are the chances that I'll encounter some situation in my life in the future and I'll be able to recall when Vonnegut describes the plot of one of Kilgore Trout's many short stories and its deeper meaning, to somehow aid me in that situation? I like to think that it'll happen but based on the quality of my memory at this stage of my life, I'm not too hopeful.
Anyway, I really like it. I like Vonnegut, too. Knowing that my dad and I have similar tastes, I should have realized much sooner that he'd already have a lot of books I want to read. I'll have to keep searching around the bookshelves of my house to see if any more of his stuff is hidden amongst all the other timeless treasures of our household.
In any case, since I need to keep a record of Vonnegut's stuff somewhere, I'll share some of the quotes that I might have otherwise devoted a status or tweet to, here:
"Trout became a fanatic on the importance of ideas as causes and cures for diseases. But nobody would listen to him. He was a dirty old man in the wilderness, crying out among the trees and underbrush, 'Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease!'"
"'The picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal--the'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us--in a mouse, in a derma in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. Our awareness is all that is alive an maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.
I have just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about to be executed at Shepherdstown. Very well--let a five-year-old paint a sacred interpretation of that encounter. Let that five-year-old strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light.'"
"I had nothing in my hand, but such was my power over Trout that he would see in it whatever I wished him to see. I might have shown him a Helen of Troy, for instance, only six inches tall.
'Mr. Trout--Kilgore--' I said, 'I hold in my hand a symbol of wholeness and harmony and nourishment. It is Oriental in its simplicity, but we are Americans, Kilgore, and not Chinamen. We Americans require symbols which are richly colored and three-dimensional and juicy. Most of all, we hunger for symbols which have not been poisoned by great suns our nation has committed, such as slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial greed and cunning.
Look up, Mr. Trout,' I said, and I waited patiently. 'Kilgore--?'
The old man looked up, and he had my father's wasted face when my father was a widower--when my father was an old old man.
He saw that I held an apple in my hand."
"What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail, like this: [illustration]
This is the snake which uncoiled itself long enough to offer Eve the apple, which looked like this: [illustration]
What was the apple which Eve and Adam ate? It was the Creator of the Universe.
And so on.
Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes."
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