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KURT VONNEGUT: Agnes Scott Commencement, Sunday, May 15th, 1999
Hammurabi gave us a code which is honored to his very day by many nations, including my own, and by all heroes in cowboy and gangster films, and by far too many people who feel they have been insulted or injured, however slightly. However accidentally: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.Revenge is not only sweet – it is a must! What antidote can there be for an idea that popular and poisonous? Revenge provides revenge, which is sure to provide revenge, forming an endless chain of human misery. Here’s the antidote: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Amen. Some of…
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Smart guy gets girl.
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My favorite selection from “A Father’s Story”
printed from the book Selected Stories by Andre Dubus I have said I talk with God in the mornings, as I start my day, and sometimes as I sit with coffee, looking at the birds, and the woods. Of course He has never spoken to me, but that is not something I require. Nor does He need to. I know Him, as I know the part of myself that knows Him, that felt Him watching from the wind and night as I kneeled over the dying boy. Lately I have taken to arguing with Him, as I can’t with Father Paul, who, when he hears my monthly confession, has not…
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Fave bad pet pic #2
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Fave bad pet pic #1
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In the Basement of the Goodwill Store
by Ted Kooser In the musty light, in the thin brown airof damp carpet, doll heads and rust,beneath long rows of sharp footfallslike nails in a lid, an old man standstrying on glasses, lifting each pairfrom the box like a glittering fishand holding it up to the lightof a dirty bulb. Near him, a heapof enameled pans as white as skullslooms in the catacomb shadows,and old toilets with dry red throatscough up bouquets of curtain rods. You’ve seen him somewhere before.He’s wearing the green leisure suityou threw out with the garbage,and the Christmas tie you hated,and the ventilated wingtip shoesyou found in your father’s closetand wore as a joke. And…
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The Merger
for my son. Trying to think of something usefulTo say about marriage, I rememberA morning when I was twenty-plus,Self-absorbed in my tinny pinkRenault Dauphine, my Little Toot,And I tried to get by a tank-truck onA bendy road too briefly straight.Shuddering, pedal floored, my frivolousVessel leveled with the cabLike a pilot fish by a shark’s grim grille. Then there was a car ahead of usAnd, as I tried to floor a pedalAlready on the floor, the blueOf ice I hadn’t seen. Spinning Toward the implacable hugeness of the cab, looking upInto the eyes of the truckdriver, I feltOnly the sweet certainty ofSubmission, call it love, as ifAlready I had left myself…
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Their lonely betters
As I listened from a beach-chair in the shadeTo all the noises that my garden made, It seemed to me only proper that wordsShould be withheld from vegetables and birds. A robin with no Christian name ran throughThe Robin-Anthem which was all it knew, And rustling flowers for some third party waitedTo say which pairs, if any, should get mated. Not one of them was capable of lying, There was not one which knew that it was dyingOr could have with a rhythm or a rhymeAssumed responsibility for time. Let them leave language to their lonely bettersWho count some days and long for certain letters; We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep: Words…
