Kurt Vonnegut

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I just finished reading this by Fry. And I hold him personally responsible for the funny looks I got on my train to work. For laughing out loud!

“People lie, cheat, rape, swindle, kill, maim, torture and destroy. Bad thing. People also pop into bed together and cosy up. Good thing. If we think fucking is a sign of moral decay then we’re a little bit stupid-stupid, aren’t we?”

Stephen Fry, The Hippopotamus

Just wanted to share this special discovery of mine with you guys. The only nag is that the whole play is divided into 12 parts due to YouTube’s 10 minute restriction. To make things easier I have collected all the parts in a playlist. See below.

Beckett On Film: Waiting for Godot

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

Through this prologue Russell demonstrates how a person might live his life in the absence of god. It is a primer, a manual, a guide for the godless. And I realise that unconsciously that is how I have endeavoured to fashion my own life. Three of my greatest passions have always been love, knowledge and sympathy. To love madly without caution, without prudence, to hunger to know and learn and to feel the suffering of fellow human beings – this is what I strive to do, this is what I aspire for in my life. And it suffices. I do not have god simply because I do not see the need for it.

Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world. Where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain.

Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.

Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor…

…I am Pagliacci.”

© Watchmen

Pagliacci is an Italian opera about Jealousy.

(Thanks to Parag for introducing me to Watchmen in the first place. It is very kafkaesque, you are right man!)

“A hundred indecisions, a hundred visions and revisions, which a minute will reverse.” That is the story of my life. But why should I even expect that my story will be interesting enough for anyone else to read? I don’t. I just believe that each one of us has a story which as a solemn duty to the life one has lead, one must put down in words. Like my grandfather who started writing his autobiography when he was in his late sixties, if my memory serves me right. He died close to eighty, without finishing it. I do not think, even for a moment he harboured any illusions of fame and fortune. He saw it as a task that he must fulfil, a journey backwards that he must embark upon as a token of gratitude towards life. For life throws at us myriad experiences, mostly painful but making us richer nonetheless. I talk about life as a being in itself, and it is. My life has a life of its own. And it is he who controls me and my destiny. Having experienced the demise of god quite early on in life, I have nothing to look forward to from life other than life itself. My only prayer each night is that the next day life throws at me something quite unexpected, quite different from the ordinary. So it is that I live for the pure thrill of life and its uncertainty. I would probably die if life became predictable. Maybe a reason why I have never felt the need to believe in astrology.

The story is best summed up in the following lines in the beginning of the book:

“Knowing how to free oneself is nothing; the difficult thing is knowing how to live with that freedom.”

Some other favourite lines of mine from the book:

“But I believe that love reaches a certain pitch once and once only, which the soul ever after seeks in vain to surpass; that in striving to resurrect that happiness, it actually wears it out; that nothing is more fatal to happiness than the memory of happiness.”

“The finest works of mankind are universally concerned with suffering. How would one tell a story of happiness? One can only tell of the origins of happiness and its destruction.”

“One has to allow people to be in the right. It’s some consolation for the fact that they don’t have anything else.”

“I can’t claim that I love danger, but I do like life to be risky, I like it to make demands on my courage, my happiness, my health at every moment…”

“They seem surprised to discover that someone with a questionable reputation can also have virtues. I cannot recognize such distinctions and reservations, for I exist as a single whole. My only claim is to be natural; if something gives me pleasure, I take that as a sign that I should do it.”

The last lines remind me of something I read on the Net which was attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

“When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.”

I wish that was what religion was to all of mankind. But then few of us are probably capable enough to live life on such pure terms. Most of us need rules handed down to us. Dostoevsky‘s idea “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” is probably more realistic in that regard.

(That is actually a paraphrased variant of Dostoevsky’s words. In Brothers Karmazov he says,”If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral; everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.”)