"Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

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has Tarkington, the severely wounded Abraham Lincoln look-alike, was brought home in 1 of his own wagons
E to Scipio, to his estate overlooking the town and lake.
He was not well educated, and was more a mechanic than a scientist, and so spent his last 3 years trying to
invent what anyone familiar with NewtonтАЩs Laws would have known was an impossibility, a perpetual-motion
machine. He had no fewer than 27 contraptions built, which he foolishly expected to go on running, after he had
given them an initial spin or whack, until Judgment Day.
I found 19 of those stubborn, mocking machines in the attic of what used to be their inventorтАЩs mansion, which in
my time was the home of the College President, about a year after I came to work at Tarkington. I brought them
back downstairs and into the 20th Century. Some of my students and I cleaned them up and restored any parts that
had deteriorated during the intervening 100 years. At the least they were exquisite
jewelry, with gamets and amethysts for bearings, with arms and legs of exotic woods, with tumbling balls of ivory,
with chutes and counterweights of silver. It was as though dying Elias hoped to overwhelm science with the magic
of precious materials.
The longest my students and I could get the best of them to run was 51 seconds. Some eternity!

To me, and I passed this on to my students, the restored devices demonstrated not only how quickly anything on
Earth runs down without steady infusions of energy. They reminded us, too, of the craftsmanship no longer
practiced in the town below. Nobody down there in our time could make things that cunning and beautiful.
Yes, and we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent
exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet
nowadays:

THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE


I have discovered from reading old newspapers and letters and diaries from back then that the men who built
the machines for Elias Tarkington knew from the first that they would never work, whatever the reason. Yet what
love they lavished on the materials that comprised them! How is this for a definition of high art:
тАЬMaking the most of the raw materials of futilityтАЭ?

Still another perpetual-motion machine envisioned by Elias Tarkington was what his Last Will and Testament
called тАЬThe Mohiga Valley Free Institute.тАЭ Upon
his death, this n~w school would take possession of his 3,000-hectare estate above Scipio, plus half the shares in
the wagon company, the carpet company, and the brewery. The other half was already owned by his sisters far away.
On his deathbed he predicted that Scipio would I day be a great metropolis and that its wealth would transform his
little college into a university to rival Harvard and Oxford and Heidelberg.
It was to offer a free college education to persons of either sex, and of any age or race or religion, living within 40
miles of Scipio. Those from farther away would pay a modest fee. In the beginning, it would have only 1 full-time
employee, the President. The teachers would be recruited right here in Scipio. They would take a few hours off
from work each week, to teach what they knew. The chief engineer at the wagon company, for example, whose
name was Andr├й Lutz, was a native of Liege, Belgium, and had served as an apprentice to a bell founder there. He
would teach Chemistry. His French wife would teach French and Watercolor Painting. The brewmaster at the
brewery, Hermann Shultz, a native of Leipzig, would teach Botany and German and the flute. The Episcopalian
priest, Dr. Alan Clewes, a graduate of Harvard, would teach Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and the Bible. The dying manтАЩs
physician, Dalton Polk, would teach Biology and Shakespeare, and so on.
And it came to pass.
In 1869 the new college enrolled its first class, 9 students in all, and all from right here in Scipio. Four were of