Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is my favourite author, the one who has always kept me approximately sane. I have posted on him before, here, here, here and here. The following is a short passage from Vonnegut’s most successful book, Slaughterhouse-Five. The central character is Billy Pilgrim, who is unstuck in time.
Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this:
GOD GRANT ME
THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT
THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE,
COURAGE
TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,
AND WISDOM ALWAYS
TO TELL THE
DIFFERENCE.
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
I remember, maybe 20 years ago, listening to triple R, and the presenter barely presented a song, saying something like, “Here’s a famous author reading a famous passage from a famous book – accompanied by a local musician”. The track started to play, and I was wide-eyed to realise that I recognized the passage, the book, and the author. It was pretty interesting hearing the good Kurt reading his work. I rang the radio station, and asked if he could play it again. He promised to do so the following week, and I turned on a cassette recorder (!) to record it. It’s still somewhere in my files – and also still on the internet – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ5uZv0XACs.
My favorite bit from the book (I remember it from the last line):
Billy turned his attention to his desk. There was an open copy of The Review of Optometry there. It was opened to an editorial, which Billy now read, his lips moving slightly.
What happens in 1968 will rule the fare of European optometrists for at least 50 years! Billy read. With this warning, Jean Thiriart, Secretary of the National Union of Belgium Opticians, is pressing for formation of a European Optometry Society. ‘ The alternatives, he says, will be the obtaining of Professional status, or, by 1971, reduction to the role of spectacle-sellers.
Billy Pilgrim tried hard to care.
Thanks, KS, and cute pseudonym. A great bit, and the book is full of them.
I saw Vonnegut speak in the 80s, in San Francisco. An example of the talking tour thing that America does. It was a bit of a canned performance in ways, but still very human and very funny, as he always would be. And great to simply see him.