"Kurt Vonnegut - Slapstick (or Lonesome no More!)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy, of long ago.
It is about what life feels like to me.
There are all these tests of my limited agility and intelligence. They go on and on.
The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy, it seems to me, was that they did their best with
every test.
They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies, and were screamingly adorable
and funny on that account.




There was very little love in their films. There was often the situational poetry of marriage,
which was something else again. It was yet another test тАФ with comical possibilities, provided
that everybody submitted to it in good faith.
Love was never at issue. And, perhaps because I was so perpetually intoxicated and instructed
by Laurel and Hardy during my childhood in the Great Depression, I find it natural to discuss life
without ever mentioning love.
It does not seem important to me.
What does seem important? Bargaining in good faith with destiny.




I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked
best could easily be described as "common decency." I treated somebody well for a little while,
or maybe even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in turn. Love need
not have had anything to do with it.
Also: I cannot distinguish between the love I have for people and the love I have for dogs.
When a child, and not watching comedians on film or listening to comedians on the radio, I
used to spend a lot of time rolling around on rugs with uncritically affectionate dogs we had.
And I still do a lot of that. The dogs become tired and confused and embarrassed long before I
do. I could go on forever.
Hi ho.




One time, on his twenty-first birthday, one of my three adopted sons, who was about to leave for
the Peace Corps in the Amazon Rain Forest, said to me, "You know тАФ you've never hugged
me."
So I hugged him. We hugged each other. It was very nice. It was like rolling around on a rug
with a Great Dane we used to have.




Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be
poisonous.
I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each
other, when they fight, "Please тАФ a little less love, and a little more common decency."