"Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You Mr Rosewater" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

*


From 1947 until 1953, the Rosewater Foundation spent fourteen million dollars. Eliot's
benefactions covered the full eleemosynary spectrum from a birth control clinic in Detroit to an
El Greco for Tampa, Florida. Rosewater dollars fought cancer and mental illness and race prejudice
and police brutality and countless other miseries, encouraged college professors to look for
truth, bought beauty at any price.
Ironically, one of the studies Eliot paid for had to do with alcoholism in San Diego. When
the report was submitted, Eliot was too drunk to read it. Sylvia had to come down to his office to
escort him home. A hundred people saw her trying to lead him across the sidewalk to a waiting cab.


file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...20-%20God%20Bless%20You%20Mr%20Rosewater.txt (5 of 79) [10/18/2004 5:20:34 PM]
 file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Kurt%20Vonnegut%20-%20God%20Bless%20You%20Mr%20Rosewater.txt

And Eliot recited for them a couplet he had spent all morning composing:


"Many, many good things have I bought!
Many, many bad things have I fought!"


*


Eliot stayed contritely sober for two clays after that, then disappeared for a week. Among
other things, he crashed a convention of science-fiction writers in a motel in Milford,
Pennsylvania. Norman Mushari learned about this episode from a private detective's report that was
in the files of McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee. Old McAllister had hired the detective to
retrace Eliot's steps, to find out if he had done things that might later legally embarrass the
Foundation.
The report contained Eliot's speech to the writers word-for-word. The meeting, including
Eliot's drunken interruption, had been taken down on tape.
"I love you sons of bitches," Eliot said in Milford. "You're all I read any more. You're
the only ones who'll talk about the _really_ terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough
to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that'll last for
billions of years. You're the only ones with guts enough to _really_ care about the future, who
_really_ notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple
ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us.
You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries
that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for
the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell."


*