Vonnegut’s Asterisk (2013)
axelhow.com
axelhow.com
> "Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be."
Seems quite apropos these days (also!) in which quite a few people who've dabbled in the "trolling for the lulz!" pond have ended up drowning, metaphorically speaking.
By pretending to be a Nazi to spy for the allies, he turned out to be very good at being a Nazi.
It's a dizzying trip around the age-old question of are we defined by what's in our hearts or by our actions, or perhaps our actions are the clearest indicator of what's in our hearts.
I have found the idea that there isn't some authentic, secret me that no one really knows to be very useful in my life. Many of us have large discrepancies between how we see ourselves and how other people see us, and I have seen a lot of people file off the gear teeth in the clockwork of their minds (to use another idea from Vonnegut); fantasizing that there is a "real" us that other people just can't see is a useful tool for doing that kind of work.
As I understand it our human being ness is largely bound to how other folks perceive us, and when we get feedback from others it's important to listen to how they seem to understand us... that's been a hard thing to learn and apply, but it's been useful in changing that feedback into (hopefully positive) changes to how I treat other people.
I think his writing really clicks with a particular type of person at a particular time in their life; if either is not quite right it seems reactions range from disinterest to hostility.
I discovered Sirens of Titan and Player Piano in high school and loved them immediately (unlike so much assigned reading) but I'm not sure I'd feel the same if I was to read them for the first time at this stage in my life. For instance, I still enjoy re-reading Hocus Pocus or Jailbird but not so much Slaughterhouse Five. I can't precisely say why, but so it goes...
I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told
my students that when they were writing they should be
good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good
times. Alternatively, they should run really nice
whorehouses, come one, come all, although they were in
fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected
them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic
arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic
symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation
marks, because it wasn't anything that hadn't been done
before.
— Timequake by Kurt VonnegutSure the Bible might be the greatest story ever told, but the most popular story is about a couple who has a good time fornicating, but then stops for one reason or another while it is still a novelty.