Cat's Cradle Unraveled

Lester Hunt is in the mood for Kurt Vonnegut - revisiting a favorite book from his youth and its iconic author.  He recently re-read Cat's Cradle after a gap of many years and enjoyed it the second time around. In a very good review, Lester grants the book its place on the "classics" pedestal but he is critical of Vonnegut's world view. Wishing to make amends for the harsh words directed at the author in his first post, he elaborates further and ends up saying more negative things. But Lester really wants to be kind to Vonnegut whom he admires as a writer but doesn't agree with as a social commentator. In his third and final post, he takes the safe route by saying less about Vonnegut and instead, show casing what Vonnegut himself had said about sundry matters. This time Lester was determined to not let his negativity show. You decide if he succeeds entirely.

According to Lester:

Some authors are very quotable (Mencken, Mark Twain, Emerson), while others who may have great virtues of their own are not quotable in that way at all (Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman). (In the latter case, it may be that they write in paragraphs rather than sentences.) Vonnegut was definitely one of the quotable ones.

Here is a list of Vonnegut quotes that Lester found compelling.

• Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!
• Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand
• Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
• We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
• There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
• Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.
• If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
• People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
• True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
• Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
• I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency."

Comments

[Dean C. Rowan]

I regret that I haven't had a moment to revisit Vonnegut, although a friend of mine has done so periodically over the years. He also made a point to attend speaking appearances by Vonnegut. His attention to the writer we loved during our immediate post-adolescence keeps him in mind for me, too.

Hunt has it right about Vonnegut's quotability, but I think it's more than a matter of paragraphs versus sentences. Vonnegut often wrote in and for aphorism, setting up the page or the paragraph to spotlight the smarmy quip. For me, that can be the deal breaker. (Is this what aggravated me with Catch-22?) But if it's handled well, it can promise a lot of reading fun.

I was rattled by the aphorism on which you commented, Ruchira, on Hunt's blog, the one about the careers of high school classmates. I have often remarked that the despicable people in, say, politics these days are all the more so for reminding me of my contemporaries in high school (excluding friends, of course). Now I wonder whether I've made that connection over the years because of Vonnegut...?

Then there's the joke about telekinesis. It sounded too familiar. Indeed, it has been attributed to the comic Steven Wright. I feel that I can hear Wright uttering the joke...but my memory has already come into question, thanks to this post.