Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84
jaymack
5,199 Posts
one of my favorite authors. i just started reading welcome to the monkeyhouse yesterdayhttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/books/11cnd-vonnegut.htmlKurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84By DINITIA SMITHKurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like ???????Slaughterhouse-Five,??????? ???????Cat????????s Cradle??????? and ???????God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater??????? caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ????????70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. ???????Mark Twain,??????? Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, ???????Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,??????? ???????finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.???????Not all Mr. Vonnegut????????s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.His novels ???????? 14 in all ???????? were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago ???????filled with bittersweet lies,??????? a narrator says).The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut????????s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. ???????The firebombing of Dresden,??????? Mr. Vonnegut wrote, ???????was a work of art.??????? It was, he added, ???????a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.???????His experience in Dresden was the basis of ???????Slaughterhouse-Five,??????? which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, ???????so perfectly caught America????????s transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.???????To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, ???????God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,??????? summed up his philosophy:???????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.???????? ???????Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him ???????one of the most able of living American writers.??????? Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.Mr. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, a fourth-generation German-American and the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut????????s brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. ???????When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information,??????? Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him, ??????? ???????All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.???????? ??????????????My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside,??????? he wrote.Mr. Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American war planes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.???????The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified,??????? he wrote in ???????Fates Worse Than Death.??????? When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children: Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut????????s sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts adopted their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a pol
ice reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. He also studied for a master????????s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on ???????The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.??????? It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel ???????Cat????????s Cradle??????? as his thesis.)In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, ???????Report on the Barnhouse Effect,??????? to Collier????????s magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started an auto dealership.His first novel was ???????Player Piano,??????? published in 1952. A satire on corporate life ???????? the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses ???????? it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley????????s ???????Brave New World.??????? It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.???????Player Piano??????? was followed in 1959 by ???????The Sirens of Titan,??????? a science fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published ???????Mother Night,??????? involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut????????s other early novels, they were published as paperback originals. And like ???????Slaughterhouse-Five,??????? in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, ???????Mother Night??????? was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published ???????Cat????????s Cradle.??????? Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science fiction writer with ???????Slaughterhouse-Five.??????? It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. ???????You know ???????? we????????ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,??????? an English colonel says in the book. ???????We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God ???????? I said to myself, ???????It????????s the Children????????s Crusade.???????? ???????As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.In ???????Slaughterhouse-Five,??????? Mr. Vonnegut introduced the recurring character of Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter ego. The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.???????Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round,??????? Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, ???????was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.???????Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.???????One of many Zen-like words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut????????s books, ???????so it goes??????? became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.???????Slaughterhouse-Five??????? reached No.1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.???????The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,??????? he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, ???????Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity.???????Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, ???????Happy Birthday, Wanda June,??????? opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife, Jane, and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)In 1979 Mr. Vonnegut married the photographer Jill Krementz. They have a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with ???????Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday??????? (1973), calling it a ???????tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.??????? This time his alter ego is Philboyd Sludge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot.In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published ???????Timequake,??????? a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, ???????a stew??????? of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. ???????If I????????d wasted my time creating characters,??????? Mr. Vonnegut said in defense of his ???????recycling,??????? ???????I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter.???????Though it was a bestseller, it also met with mixed reviews. ???????Having a novelist????????s free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride,??????? R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: ???????The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut????????s transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir.???????Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to ???????Timequake??????? that it would be his last novel. And so it was.His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, ???????A Man Without a Country.??????? It, too, was a best seller.In concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called ???????Requiem,??????? which has these closing lines:When the last living thinghas died on account of us,how poetical it would beif Earth could say,in a voice floating upperhapsfrom the floorof the Grand Canyon,???????It is done.???????People did not like it here.
ice reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. He also studied for a master????????s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on ???????The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.??????? It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel ???????Cat????????s Cradle??????? as his thesis.)In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, ???????Report on the Barnhouse Effect,??????? to Collier????????s magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started an auto dealership.His first novel was ???????Player Piano,??????? published in 1952. A satire on corporate life ???????? the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses ???????? it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley????????s ???????Brave New World.??????? It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.???????Player Piano??????? was followed in 1959 by ???????The Sirens of Titan,??????? a science fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published ???????Mother Night,??????? involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut????????s other early novels, they were published as paperback originals. And like ???????Slaughterhouse-Five,??????? in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, ???????Mother Night??????? was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published ???????Cat????????s Cradle.??????? Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science fiction writer with ???????Slaughterhouse-Five.??????? It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. ???????You know ???????? we????????ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,??????? an English colonel says in the book. ???????We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God ???????? I said to myself, ???????It????????s the Children????????s Crusade.???????? ???????As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.In ???????Slaughterhouse-Five,??????? Mr. Vonnegut introduced the recurring character of Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter ego. The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.???????Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round,??????? Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, ???????was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.???????Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.???????One of many Zen-like words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut????????s books, ???????so it goes??????? became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.???????Slaughterhouse-Five??????? reached No.1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.???????The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,??????? he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, ???????Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity.???????Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, ???????Happy Birthday, Wanda June,??????? opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife, Jane, and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)In 1979 Mr. Vonnegut married the photographer Jill Krementz. They have a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with ???????Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday??????? (1973), calling it a ???????tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.??????? This time his alter ego is Philboyd Sludge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot.In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published ???????Timequake,??????? a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, ???????a stew??????? of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. ???????If I????????d wasted my time creating characters,??????? Mr. Vonnegut said in defense of his ???????recycling,??????? ???????I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter.???????Though it was a bestseller, it also met with mixed reviews. ???????Having a novelist????????s free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride,??????? R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: ???????The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut????????s transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir.???????Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to ???????Timequake??????? that it would be his last novel. And so it was.His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, ???????A Man Without a Country.??????? It, too, was a best seller.In concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called ???????Requiem,??????? which has these closing lines:When the last living thinghas died on account of us,how poetical it would beif Earth could say,in a voice floating upperhapsfrom the floorof the Grand Canyon,???????It is done.???????People did not like it here.
Comments
RIP
So it goes, indeed.
RIP Mr. Vonnegut
RIP Mr. Trout
Knew it was coming. Longtime smoker, etc.
I love this man. I used to drive by his childhood home going to my job the summers I lived in Indianapolis. There was no one who has been able to capture the beauty and strangeness of a midwestern existence quite like him. He was one of a kind, intelligent, and the funniest author I've ever read.
R.I.P.
Truly. I learned to be a humanist from his books. Certainly one of the best authors of the 20th century. RIP.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97:
Wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.
Do one thing every day that scares you. Sing. Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.
Floss.
Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.
Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.
Stretch.
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.
Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.
Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.
Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.
Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.
Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good.
Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.
Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on.
Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.
Travel.
Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander.
You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders.
Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.
Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.
But trust me on the sunscreen.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Boston, Ma. 1997"
RIP
Yeah--commencement speeches are generally painfully bad, but that one is uniquely so.
kinda sorta but probably not really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everybody's_Free_(To_Wear_Sunscreen)
Why would Kurt Vonnegut read a commencement speech written by somebody else?
He wasn't even the commencement speaker at MIT in 1998, when that speech was supposedly delivered--it was Kofi Annan.
Baz Luhrmann.
damn, dude...taking me back They used to play that shit at the record store we worked at back in the day. Man, every cornball and their cornball mother was trying to buy that cd back in the day. I really always hated that shit.
but the beat behind the reading on that cd was illson.
RIP
i just got up on his short stories. real fire.
anyone read "Man without a Country" ?
seriously will be missed. man was absolutely hilarious.
Yes, I read it in a few hours and thought it was good. Not really a novel, more just thoughts and odds and ends, but still really worth checking out.
hahahaha!
vonnegut rules and i remember being obsessed with him as a teenager. i haven't broken those books out in a long while but i'm sure they're still as funny as when i first read them.
Link to articles
?
p.s. wide open beavers/blink
Indeed. RIP
They read this one at the beginning of the year, which, surprisingly, one of my students mentioned at random during a conversation in the hall yesterday.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren???t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren???t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron???s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn???t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn???t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel???s cheeks, but she???d forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George???s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
???That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,??? said Hazel.
???Huh???? said George.
???That dance ??? it was nice,??? said Hazel.
???Yup,??? said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren???t really very good ??? no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn???t be handicapped. But he didn???t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.
???Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,??? said George.
???I???d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,??? said Hazel, a little envious. ???All the things they think up.???
???Um,??? said George.
???Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do???? said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. ???If I was Diana Moon Glampers,??? said Hazel, ???I???d have chimes on Sunday ??? just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.???
???I could think, if it was just chimes,??? said George.
???Well ??? maybe make ???em real loud,??? said Hazel. ???I think I???d make a good Handicapper General.???
???Good as anybody else,??? said George.
???Who knows better???n I do what normal is???? said Hazel.
???Right,??? said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
???Boy!??? said Hazel, ???that was a doozy, wasn???t it????
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.
???All of a sudden you look so tired,??? said Hazel. ???Why don???t you stretch out on the sofa, so???s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.??? She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in canvas bag, which was padlocked around George???s neck. ???Go on and rest the bag for a little while,??? she said. ???I don???t care if you???re not equal to me for a while.???
George weighed the bag with his hands. ???I don???t mind it,??? he said. ???I don???t notice it any more. It???s just a part of me.
???You been so tired lately ??? kind of wore out,??? said Hazel. ???If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few.???
???Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,??? said George. ???I don???t call that a bargain.???
???If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,??? said Hazel. ???I mean ??? you don???t compete with anybody around here. You just set around.???
???If I tried to get away with it,??? said George, ???then other people???d get away with it and pretty soon we???d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn???t like that, would you????
???I???d hate it,??? said Hazel.
???There you are,??? said George. ???The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society????
If Hazel hadn???t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn???t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
???Reckon it???d fall all apart,??? said Hazel.
???What would???? said George blankly.
???Society,??? said Hazel uncertainly. ???Wasn???t that what you just said????
???Who knows???? said George.
The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn???t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, ???Ladies and gentlemen ??? ???
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.
???That???s all right ?????? Hazel said of the announcer, ???he tried. That???s the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.???
???Ladies and gentlemen??? said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. ???Excuse me ??? ??? she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
???Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,??? she said in a grackle squawk, ???has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under???handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.???
A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen ??? upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison???s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever worn heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H???G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H???G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle???tooth random.
???If you see this boy,??? said the ballerina, ???do not ??? I repeat, do not ??? try to reason with him.???
There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have ??? for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. ???My God ?????? said George, ???that must be Harrison!???
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
???I am the Emperor!??? cried Harrison. ???Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!??? He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
???Even as I stand here ?????? he bellowed, ???crippled, hobbled, sickened ??? I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!???
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison???s scrap???iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber???ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.
???I shall now select my Empress!??? he said, looking down on the cowering people. ???Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!???
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all, he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
???Now??? said Harrison, taking her hand, ???shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!??? he commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. ???Play your best,??? he told them, ???and I???ll make you barons and dukes and earls.???
The music began. It was normal at first ??? cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while ??? listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girl???s tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.
They kissed it.
And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons??? television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George.
But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. ???You been crying???? he said to Hazel.
???Yup,??? she said,
???What about???? he said.
???I forget,??? she said. ???Something real sad on television.???
???What was it???? he said.
???It???s all kind of mixed up in my mind,??? said Hazel.
???Forget sad things,??? said George.
???I always do,??? said Hazel.
???That???s my girl,??? said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun in his head.
???Gee ??? I could tell that one was a doozy,??? said Hazel.
???You can say that again,??? said George.
???Gee ?????? said Hazel, ???I could tell that one was a doozy.???
Someone posted this awhile back. Vonnegut reading Cat's Cradle.