"Vonnegut, Kurt - Cat's Cradle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

118. The Iron Maiden and the Oubliette
119. Mona Thanks Me
120. To Whom It May Concern
121. I Am Slow to Answer
122. The Swiss Family Robinson
123. Of Mice and Men
124. Frank's Ant Farm
125. The Tasmanians
126. Soft Pipes, Play On
127. The End




cat's cradle







The Day the World Ended 1


Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Jonah--John--if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still--not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.
Listen:
When I was a younger man--two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago.
When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called _The Day the World Ended_.
The book was to be factual.
The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then.
I am a Bokononist now.
I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon. But Bokononism was unknown beyond the gravel beaches and coral knives that ring this little island in the Caribbean Sea, the Republic of San Lorenzo.
We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a _karass_ by Bokonon, and the instrument, the _kan-kan_, that brought me into my own particular _karass_ was the book I never finished, the book to be called _The Day the World Ended_.









Nice, Nice, Very Nice 2


"If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your _karass_."
At another point in _The Books of Bokonon_ he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the _karass_." By that he means that a _karass_ ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.