Cat's Cradle

A history of human stupidity. 

I am not about to write such a thing, but the idea is amusing.  Sadly, the book would be too long to read in a lifetime—and that is assuming you were just reading the abridged version. 

But, we have the next best thing: Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle.  It’s nominally fiction, but fiction of the sort that says something truer than non-fiction.

This is Vonnegut’s fourth novel.  As I have noted in this space before, thanks to the Library of America publishing all of Vonnegut, I embarked on reading him in order and it all makes so much more sense now.  I had read this novel before, and when I finished it, I had no idea what I just read and thus I promptly forgot the whole thing.  But now, after reading Sirens of Titan and Mother Night, the novel was perfectly sensible.   What is curious about this fact:  Cat’s Cradle is in no way a sequel to the previous two books other than being the intellectual sequel—Vonnegut could only have written this book after writing the previous two. 

Insofar as there is a thesis in this book it is this:  History is just one stupid human act after another and in the end we all die and it was perfectly meaningless.  Yet,  this is no cause for despair.  Because, when you look at it, when you really look closely at it, when you press your eyeball right up against history and stare as intensely as you can at it, then you see that all this human stupidity is really quite funny.  You just have to stop taking everything so seriously.  You have to stop striving for some Big Think overarching narrative story that makes sense of the whole thing in terms of Grand Causes or Grand Cosmic Ends.  Just chop up reality into really tiny parts (this book is 183 pages long and has 127 chapters—you do the math) and look at each part on its own and realize that each part, which follows from what went before and leads to what comes after, each part individually is just another senseless act of stupidity in a long string of actions of senseless stupidity all leading to yet more acts of senseless stupidity.  In the end, we all die.  But, don’t get all worked up about that either—even our death is just one more small little bit of human stupidity following inexorably from what came before.  So laugh.  Really, just laugh. 

This is a brilliant book.  Wrong, of course—there is a Grand Overarching Cosmic Narrative—but wrong in a useful way.  For example—take this moment.  (Whether that means the moment the following is being written or the moment the following is being read is irrelevant, but it will be more amusing to consider the latter).  I want to, and truth be told, you Dear Reader also want to, imagine that this moment is larger than it is, that there is some Great Purpose to this moment, that this moment cannot be stripped out of eternity and held up like a 1.44 page chapter as an entity unto itself and laughed at.  I (and you) want to believe that there is some larger meaning to all this, that I am not simply adding to the chronicle of human stupidity by writing this and that you are not adding an even greater stupidity by actually reading this.  (Who’s the more foolish: the fool or the fool who follows him? (If you don’t know the soruce of that, I weep for you.))  We, you and I, Dear Reader, want to weave this moment into something meaningful.  Yet, is it?  Can I honestly say that by writing these rambling semi-coherent reflections I am adding to human wisdom?  I am rehashing a book which I said up front was a book I read before and promptly forgot because it seemed so purposeless and now I am calling it brilliant because I found some purpose in a purposeless book and you are reading my second-hand reflections on the book hoping to discover…what?  What, Dear Reader, did you really hope to attain in the few moments you read this blog post?  Did you honestly expect to become more wise, to lessen the amount of human stupidity in history by charging forth after reading this to revolutionize the world?  Did you really believe that by reading this blog post you would make the world would a better place?

I just opened Cat’s Cradle at random.  Chapter 98.  We read in that chapter:

“I agree with one Bokonist idea.  I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies.”

Is that Bokonist Idea the truth or a lie?  That of course is the Joke.    As the Cretan said, “All Cretans are liars.”  The apostle Paul (or should that be Saint Paul?) said that.  Now Paul was writing to Titus when he said that and Titus was ministering to the people of Crete and Paul used that joke to remind Titus about the sort of people he was serving.  Paul wasn't kidding—as he said, “that statement is true.”  Paul has a sense of humor too.  So, opening up Cat’s Cradle at random, truly at random, I suddenly found Vonnegut and Paul sharing a joke and then I wrote about it, and you Dear Reader, read about it, and what did we all, you, me, Vonnegut, and Paul, just accomplish?  This paragraph is 2000 years in the making, and we just advanced humanity…how?

So, while I believe in the Grand Cosmic Narrative, while I believe there is a teleological point to human existence, it is hard to escape the Vonnegutian Perspective.  Moment by moment, history sure does seem like just one stupid thing after another.  Momet by moment, those acts of stupidity are pretty funny.  I am very amused that you are actually still reading this, Dear Reader.  At what point did you miss the cue that there is nothing here worth reading?

Page 47.  I just picked that page number at random.  (Was it truly random?  Why 47?  I have no idea.)  I am about to turn to page 47 and will transcribe a sentence from that page.  I note this to give you fair warning.  Do you really believe there is any possibility that something on page 47 of this book will generate an observation which is worth your time, Dear Reader?  Think of this as the Rorschach test moment.  If your answer to that was “Yes,” then what, Dear Reader, gives you any hope that a sentence on a random page from a random book on a random blog written by Your Humble Narrator will have meaning?  And, if your answer was “No,” then why are you still reading (that isn’t a rhetorical question)?

From page 47: OK.  I’ll admit it, this is really quite eerie.  The first thing on page 47 is the end of chapter 32:

But all I could say as a Christian then was, “Life is sure funny sometimes.”

“And sometimes it isn’t,” said Marvin Breed.

Here is the part I find seriously troubling.  I really did just pick the number 47 at random, wrote the preceding paragraph and then turned to page 47 and there it was.  I did not rewrite the preceding paragraph in any way after turning to page 47.  I, of course, have absolutely no way to convince you, Dear Reader, that this was, in fact what happened.  Indeed, I suspect you think this whole thing is rigged.  Honestly, if I was reading this blog post I would think this whole thing was some lame attempt to make a point.   I can’t think of anything the author could write that would convince me otherwise.  But, as the writer of this blog post, I know something you, the Reader, don’t know.  It really did just happen   It wasn't made up.  I am troubled.  This is just too strange for my tastes.  I mean I get that God has a sense of humor too, but to orchestrate things so that I would turn to that page at the end of this blog post and find those two sentences right at the top of the page…well, that is just a bit too much Grand Cosmic Narrative for my tastes.  I am seriously troubled.  (Really, no joke here.)