"Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Now her sort of impoliteness is fashionable. But nobody believes anymore in a new
American paradise. I sure miss Phoebe Hurty.


As for the suspicion I express in this book, that human beings are robots, are
machines: It should be noted that people, mostly men, suffering from the last stages of
syphilis, from locomotor ataxia, were common spectacles in downtown Indianapolis and
in circus crowds when I was a boy.
Those people were infested with carnivorous little corkscrews which could be seen
only with a microscope. The victims' vertebrae were welded together after the cork-
screws got through with the meat between. The syphilitics seemed tremendously
dignifiedтАФerect, eyes straight ahead.
I saw one stand on a curb at the corner of Meridian and Washington Streets one
time, underneath an overhanging clock which my father designed. The intersection was
known locally as "The Crossroads of America"
This syphilitic man was thinking hard there, at the Crossroads of America, about how
to get his legs to step off the curb and carry him across Washington Street. He
shuddered gently, as though he had a small motor which was idling inside. Here was his
problem: his brains, where the instructions to his legs originated, were being eaten alive
by corkscrews. The wires which had to carry the instructions weren't insulated anymore,
or were eaten clear through. Switches along the way were welded open or shut.
This man looked like an old, old man, although he might have been only thirty years old.
He thought and thought. And then he kicked two times like a chorus girl. He certainly
looked like a machine to me when I was a boy.


I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical
reactions seething inside. When I was a boy, I saw a lot of people with goiters. So did
Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac dealer who is the hero of this book. Those unhappy
Earthlings had such swollen thyroid glands that they seemed to have zucchini squash
growing from their throats.
All they had to do in order to have ordinary lives, it turned out, was to consume less
than one-millionth of an ounce of iodine every day.
My own mother wrecked her brains with chemicals, which were supposed to make
her sleep.
When I get depressed, I take a little pill, and I cheer up again.
 And so on.
So it is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is
what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals
which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.


What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel
lousy about my books. My friend Knox Burger said one time that a certain cumbersome
novel ". . . read as though it had been written by Philboyd Studge." That's who I think I
am when I write what I am seemingly programmed to write.


This book is my fiftieth birthday present to myself. I feel as though I am crossing the
spine of a roofтАФhaving ascended one slope.