Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
Okay…I want to blog about three films and three books. Luckily, it’s raining so I can’t go on my intended bike ride and instead have lots of time to catch up. I should probably blog about music too but right now these are priority.
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
Let me say that Vonnegut always has a way of bringing out the laughter and the tears in me at once…his struggle to make sense of the quandries we are placed in as humans…how we build and rebuild societies only to have them destroyed by wars for example or just in general the absurdism in life and the struggle between destiny and free will. This book has the usual characters, Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut’s alterego makes appearances throughout and there are some affecting stories. The main idea of this one is that there is a point in which everyone has to relive the last ten years…in some cases, relive wrongful imprisonment or suicide etc. exactly the way that they did the first time even with the knowledge of what happened during the initial ten years and what the results were. My only real criticism of the book is that I felt that this was such a great idea he should have explored more into each character and what the book really becomes about instead is sort of a tangential sentimental journey Vonnegut must take so that he can call it quits. You get the feeling that Vonnegut is coming to terms with the end of his writing and he is also looking back at all of what he loves disappeared.
There’s some wit along this journey as usual and you can just picture even Vonnegut himself running up to people that acted as if frozen stiff yelling :”Wake Up FREE WILL!!” There are the usual random coincidences intermixed with tragedies that are just passed off as fitting into the nonsensical fabric of life. But there are times in this one, more than any other Vonnegut novels I have read (I’ve only read five or six of them, I’m not an afficianado like some people I know…yes I mean you, Pete.), in which Vonnegut really shows that he’s struggling to come to terms with his own life and career and make sense of his life’s work.
I’d like to give some examples and let them speak for themselves…and I would encourage anyone who hasn’t done so already to sit down with a few of Vonnegut’s novels and to glean the bits of wisdom from them because they are there to be recognized and found and we are here to learn that we have to make life meaningful and do our best to try to make sense of it.
42: “I wish I’d written Our Town. I wish I’d invented Rollerblades.
p.92: : “The main thing about Van Gogh and me,’ said Trout, ‘is that he painted pictures that astonished him with their importance, even though nobody else thought they were worth a damn, and I write stories that astonish me, even though nobody else thinks they’re worth a damn.”
169: I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki.
p.200: (a reoccurent theme) “You were sick but now you’re well again and there’s work to do”
p.210: “Chicago is a better city than New York because Chicago has alleys. The garbage doesn’t pile up on the sidewalks. Delivery vehicles don’t block main thoroughfares.”
p.210: ” Adam and Eve, more in love that they ever have been before, tell Him that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know it was going to end sometime.”
p.211: “I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around!”
p213: “Your awareness,’ he said. ‘That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very beautiful, which is human awareness”
p218: “I was the baby of the family. Now I don’t have anyone to show off for anymore.”
(now playing: Youth Group: Skeleton Jar)