Bluebeard

_Bluebeard_ by Kurt Vonnegut

NY:  Dell Publishing, 1987

ISBN 0-440-20196-9

Author’s Note:  May I say, too, that much of what I put in this book was inspired by the grotesque prices paid for works of art during the past century.  Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions to endow certain sorts of human playfulness with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness.  I think not only of the mudpies of art, but of children’s games as well - running, jumping, catching, throwing.

Or dancing.

Or singing songs.

(12)  Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word:  _Embarrassment_.

(49)  She had figured out that the most pervasive American disease was loneliness, and that even people at the top often suffered from it, and that they could be surprisingly responsive to attractive strangers who were friendly.

(60)  “That’s the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards,” said Mrs. Berman.  “You don’t write for the whole world, and you don’t write for ten people or two.  You write for just one person.”

(66)  I wasn’t like my parents.  I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends and relatives to leave behind.  Nowhere has the number _zero_ been more of philosophical value than in the United States.

(82)  But let’s forget me for the moment, and focus on the works of Gregory [famous illustrator].  They were truthful about material things, but they lied about time.  He celebrated the moments, anything from a child’s first meeting with a department store Santa Claus to the victory of a gladiator at the Circus Maximus, from the driving of the golden spike which completed a transcontinental railroad to a man’s going on his knees to ask a woman to marry him.  But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other and that all moments quickly run away.

(132)  About a year later, I got around to asking him [Gregory] what he thought the people of the United States really were, and he said, “Spoiled children, who are begging for a frightening but just Daddy to tell them exactly what to do.”

(165)  “‘Contentedly adrift in the cosmos,’ were you?”  Kitchen [abstract expressionist] said to me.  “That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while.  How long did the feeling last?”

“Oh - maybe half an hour,” I said.

And he leaned back in his chair and he said with satisfaction:  “And there you are.”

(170-171)  They were West Germans [visitors to his private collection of paintings], as I say, but they could just as easily have been fellow citizens of mine from right down the beach.  And I wonder now if that isn’t a secret ingredient in the attitudes of so many people here, citizens or not:  that this is still a virgin continent, and that everybody else is an Indian who does not appreciate its value, or is at least too weak and ignorant to defend himself?

*     *    *

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else.  That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country.  It can be the past instead - the Unites States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.

This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments.  What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-hunan aborigines?

NB:  Not just America, Bub

(175)  The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family.

NB: see Ben Franklin as Silence Dogood on college education

"I reflected in my Mind on the extream Folly of those Parents, who, blind to their Childrens Dulness, and insensible of the Solidity of their Skulls, because they think their Purses can afford it, will needs send them to the Temple of Learning*, where, for want of a suitable Genius, they learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely, (which might as well be acquir’d at a Dancing-School,) and from whence they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.”

Benjamin Franklin, at age 16 in 1722, writing as Silence Dogood, widowed matron with a college-aged son

* He specifically refers to Harvard College at the end of the essay.

(215)  “The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition... [women who would do anything for food or protection for themselves and the children and the old people, since the young men were dead or gone away]…  It’s always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.” [Said by Mrs. Berman}

(273)  “Because,” I said, “the Japanese were as responsible as the Germans for turning Americans into a bunch of bankrupt militaristic fuckups - after we’d done such a good job of being sincere war-haters after the First World War.”

NB:  Forgetting, of course, the constant little wars in Central America, the Caribbean, and other places around the world.

(279)  “I think maybe it’s terribly important the same way a head-on collision is important,” I said.  “There’s undeniable impact.  Something has sure as hell happened.”

(281)  “The whole magical thing about our painting [abstract expressionism], Mrs. Berman, and this was old stuff in music, but it was brand new in painting:  it was pure _essence of human wonder_, and wholly apart from food, from sex, from clothes, from houses, from drugs, from cars, from news, from money, from crime, from punishment, from games, from war, from peace - and surely apart from the universal human impluse among painters and plumbers alike toward inexplicable despair and self-destruction!"