What Kurt Vonnegut Said About Babies Better Than Anyone Else - 3/9/2012

-

"There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

"This line from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater comes as part of a baptismal speech the protagonist says he's planning for his neighbors' twins: "Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind." It's an odd speech to make over a couple of infants, but it's playful, sweet, yet keenly precise in its summation of everything a new addition to the planet should need to know. By narrowing down all his advice for the future down to a few simple words, Vonnegut emphasizes what's most important in life. At the same time, he lets his frustration with all the people who obviously don't get it leak through just a little."



For 14 more things Kurt Vonnegut said better than anyone else ever has or will, see uber Vonnegut fans compilation at http://www.avclub.com/articles/15-things-kurt-vonnegut-said-better-than-anyone-el,1858/
Posted by Gail Vida Hamburg at 18:30

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fe

-
  Elias Canetti’s   Auto-da-Fe Annotation by Gail Vida Hamburg Author of   The Edge of the World   (Mirare Press) “You believe in alarming people to the point of panic. Is it the writer’s function to bring more fear into the world?” Herman Broch once asked Elias Canetti. Presumably, Broch was responding to Canetti’s Auto-da-Fe, a cautionary tale about the dangers of detached intellectualism. Canetti originally planned his tragi-comic tale set in Vienna and Paris in the 1930s, as part of a series of novels about mad men and visionaries. It became instead, an absurdist romp about one man’s descent into insanity by mass provocation. The main character in the novel is Peter Kien, the world’s foremost authority on China, and evidently everything else. “No branch of human literature was unfamiliar to him … the few papers he had published were known word for word by his peers … a sentence once set down by him was decisive and binding … in controversial questions he was the ...
Read more

Conquered "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

-
  "... Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude do not have a second opportunity on earth."      -- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Annotation by Gail Vida Hamburg Author of   The Edge of the World   (Mirare Press) Whereas in the West, one thinks of “solitude” as a desired state, a reward for putting oneself through the daily machinations of industry and commerce; solitude as I understand it in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s epic novel,   One Hundred Years of Solitude , speaks of a different, sadder condition—not the European notion of existentialism, but a profound loneliness, a sentence of exile. Jose Arcadio Buendia and his men, and their families were wanderers who had crossed the mountains to find the sea. When two years had gone by and they had still not located it, they stopped at the bank of a river. Because they could go no further, nor return to the past, they settled on the ground beneath their feet. They called it...
Read more

Oh What A Book - Yann Martel's Life of Pi

-
  Yann Martel’s   Life of Pi Reviewed by Gail Vida Hamburg Author of   The Edge of the World   (Mirare Press) Life of Pi   begins earnestly with a fetchingly loquacious Author’s Note. In the italicized prelude, Yann Martel explains the perfunctory response to his previous novel in his native Canada: “Reviewers were puzzled, or damned it with faint praise. Then readers ignored it.” Martel explains his flight to India to finish his work in progress, a tale set in Portugal in 1939. “Unfortunately,” he writes “the novel sputtered, coughed and died … an element is missing, that spark that brings to life a real story. The discovery is something soul-destroying.” The disillusioned writer mentions his wanderings through South India, on no particular mission apparently, other than to lose himself. In Pondicherry--a former French colonial outpost south of Madras--he meets an elderly man, Francis Adirubasamy, who tells him ominously, ‘I have a story that will make you beli...
Read more