INSTRUCTOR-PROVIDED READINGS
COMP. II LOIBNER-WAITKUS • UA-PTC
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You can’t test courage cautiously. –Annie Dillard
We are here, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why. –Kurt Vonnegut
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
“Same Drugs” by Chance the Rapper.....................................................................7 “Candles” by Daughter.............................................................................................9 “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut...............................................................10 “The First Amendment” by Kurt Vonnegut.........................................................14 “A Moment in Troy” by Wiława Szymborska.....................................................20 “Four A.M.” by Wiława Szymborska....................................................................22 “The Deer at Providencia” by Annie Dillard.......................................................23
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SAME DRUGS
by Chance the Rapper
We don’t do the same drugs no more. We don’t do the, we don’t do the same drugs, Do the same drugs no more. ‘Cause she don’t do the same drugs no more. We don’t do the, we don’t do the same drugs, Do the same drugs no more. When did you change? Wendy, you’ve aged. I thought you’d never grow up. I thought you’d never— Window closed. Wendy got old. I was too late. I was too late, A shadow of what I once was. ‘Cause we don’t do the same drugs no more. We don’t do the, we don’t do the same drugs, Do the same drugs no more. She don’t laugh the same way no more. We don’t do the, we don’t do the same drugs, Do the same drugs no more. Where did you go? Why would you stay? You must have lost your marbles. You always were so forgetful. In a hurry, Don’t wait up. I was too late. I was too late, A shadow of what I once was. ‘Cause we don’t, We don’t do what we say we’re gonna. You were always perfect, And I was only practice. Don’t you miss the days, stranger? Don’t you miss the days? Don’t you miss the danger?
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We don’t do the same drugs no more. We don’t do the, we don’t do the same drugs, Do the same drugs no more. We don’t do the same drugs no more. We don’t do the, we don’t do the same drugs, Do the same drugs no more. We don’t do the, we don’t do the same drugs. Turn it around. I remember when— This age of pathetics. Don’t forget the happy thoughts. All you need is happy thoughts, The past tense, past bed time, Way back then when everything we read was real, And everything we said rhymed. Wide eyed kids being kids, Why did you stop? What did you do to your hair? Where did you go to end up right back here? When did you start to forget how to fly? It’s so natural, Just like Juicy Fruit, Works like a magic trick. Please give me half of that. Don’t you color out. Don’t you bleed on out. Oh, Stay in the line. Stay in the line, Dandelion. It’s so natural, Just like Juicy Fruit, Works like a magic trick. Please give me half of that. Don’t you color out. Don’t you bleed on out. Oh, Stay in the line. Stay in the line, Dandelion. 2016
SOURCE: Beach, Brian, et al.. “Same Drugs.” Coloring Book, performed by Chance the Rapper, Apple Music, 2016. Composition II • Instructor-provided Readings • Loibner-Waitkus • PAGE 8
CANDLES
by Daughter
That boy, take me away into the night Out of the hum of the street lights and into a forest. I’ll do whatever you say to me in the dark Scared I’ll be torn apart by a wolf in mask of a familiar name on a birthday card. Blow out all the candles. Blow out all the candles. “You’re too old to be so shy,” he says to me, so I stay the night. Just a young heart confusing my mind, but we’re both in silence. Wide-eyed, both in silence. Wide-eyed, like we’re in a crime scene. Well, I have brittle bones it seems. I bite my tongue and torch my dreams. Have a little voice to speak with And a mind of thoughts and secrects. Things cannot be reversed. We learn from the times we are cursed Things cannot be reversed, learn from the ones we fear the worst And learn from the ones we hate the most how to Blow out all the candles. Blow out all the candles. “You’re too old to be so shy,” he says to me, so I stay the night. Just a young heart confusing my mind, but we’re both in silence. Wide-eyed, both in silence. Wide-eyed. ‘Cause we both know I’ll never be your lover. I only bring the heat. Company under cover Filling space in your sheets. Well, I’ll never be a lover. I only bring the heat. Company under cover Filling space in your sheets, in your sheets. So please just blow out all the candles. Blow out all the candles. “You’re too old to be so shy,” he says to me, so I stay the night. It’s just a young heart confusing my mind, but we’re both in silence. Wide-eyed, both in silence. Wide-eyed, like we’re in a crime scene. 2012 SOURCE: Tonra, Elena Veronica, and Igor Alexandre Haefeli. “Candles.” His Young Heart, performed by Daughter, Glassnote, 2012. Composition II • Instructor-provided Readings • Loibner-Waitkus • PAGE 9
HARRISON BERGERON
T
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away. It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains. George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about. On the television screen were ballerinas. A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm. “That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel. “Huh” said George. “That dance—it was nice,” said Hazel. “Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good— no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sash-weights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug
by Kurt Vonnegut
in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas. Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been. “Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George. “I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel a little envious. “All the things they think up.” “Um,” said George. “Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday—just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.” “I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George. “Well—maybe make ‘em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.” “Good as anybody else,” said George. “Who knows better then I do what normal is?” said Hazel. “Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-onegun salute in his head stopped that. “Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?” It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples. “All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring to the forty-sev-
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en pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me for a while.” George weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice it any more. It’s just a part of me.” “You been so tired lately—kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few.” “Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.” “If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean—you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just set around.” “If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it—and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?” “I’d hate it,” said Hazel. “There you are,” said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?” If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head. “Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel. “What would?” said George blankly. “Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said? “Who knows?” said George. The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and Gentlemen—” He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read. “That’s all right—” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.” “Ladies and Gentlemen—” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraor-
dinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men. And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me—” she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive. “Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.” A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen—upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall. The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides. Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds. And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random. “If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not—I repeat, do not—try to reason with him.” There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges. Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake. George Bergeron correctly identified the earth-
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quake, and well he might have—for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. “My God—” said George, “that must be Harrison!” The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head. When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen. Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood— in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die. “I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook. “Even as I stand here—” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened—I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!” Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds. Harrison’s scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor. Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall. He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder. “I shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people. “Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!” A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow. Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask. She was blindingly beautiful. “Now—” said Harrison, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” he commanded. The musicians scrambled back into their chairs,
and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.” The music began. It was normal at first— cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs. The music began again and was much improved. Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while—listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it. They shifted their weights to their toes. Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers. And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang! Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well. They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun. They leaped like deer on the moon. The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it. And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time. It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor. Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on. It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out. Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer. George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying” he said to
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Hazel. “Yup,” she said. “What about?” he said. “I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.” “What was it?” he said. “It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel. “Forget sad things,” said George.
“I always do,” said Hazel. “That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head. “Gee—I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel. “You can say that again,” said George. “Gee—” said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.” 1961
SOURCE: Vonnegut, Kurt. “Harrison Bergeron.” Welcome to the Monkey House, the special edition, Dial Press, 2014, pp. 7-14. Composition II • Instructor-provided Readings • Loibner-Waitkus • PAGE 13
THE FIRST AMENDMENT
I
by Kurt Vonnegut
I am a member of what I believe to be the last recognizable generation of full-time, life-time American novelists. We appear to be standing more or less in a row. It was the Great Depression which made us similarly edgy and watchful. It was World War II which lined us up so nicely, whether we were men or women, whether we were ever in uniform or not. It was an era of romantic anarchy in publishing which gave us money and mentors, willy-nilly, when we were young—while we learned our craft. Words printed on pages were still the principal form of long-distance communication and stored information in America when we were young. No more. Nor are there many publishers and editors and agents left who are eager to find some way to get money and other forms of encouragement to young writers who write as clumsily as members of my literary generation did when we started out. The wild and wonderful and expensive guess was made back then that we might acquire some wisdom and learn how to write halfway decently by and by. Writers were needed that much back then. It was an amusing and instructive time for writers—for hundreds of them. Television wrecked the short-story branch of the industry, and now accountants and business school graduates dominate book publishing. They feel that money spent on someone’s first novel is good money down a rat hole. They are right. It almost always is. So, as I say, I think I belong to America’s last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that. Many will have inherited or married money. The most influential of my bunch, in my opinion, is still J. D. Salinger, although he has been silent for years. The most promising was perhaps Edward Lewis Wallant, who died so young. And it is my thinking about the death of James Jones two years ago, who was not all that young, who was almost exactly my age, which accounts for the autumnal mood of this book. There have been other
reminders of my own mortality, to be sure, but the death of Jones is central—perhaps because I see his widow Gloria so often and because he, too, was a self-educated midwesterner, and because he, too, in a major adventure for all of us, which was the Second World War, had been an enlisted man. And let it here be noted that the best-known members of my literary generation, if they wrote about war, almost unanimously despised officers and made heroes of sketchily educated,aggressively unaristocratic enlisted men. • • • James Jones told me one time that his publisher and Ernest Hemingway’s, Charles Scribner’s Sons, had once hoped to get Jones and Hemingway together—so that they could enjoy each other’s company as old warriors. Jones declined, by his own account, because he did not regard Hemingway as a fellow soldier. He said Hemingway in wartime was free to come and go from the fighting as he pleased, and to take time off for a fine meal or woman or whatever. Real soldiers, according to Jones, damn well had to stay where they were told, or go where they were told, and eat swill, and take the worst the enemy had to throw at them day after day, week after week. • • • It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment. Our American heirs may find it incredible, as most foreigners do right now, that a nation would want to enforce as a law something which sounds more like a dream, which reads as follows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of griev-
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ances.” How could a nation with such a law raise its children in an atmosphere of decency? It couldn’t— it can’t. So the law will surely be repealed soon for the sake of children. And even now my books, along with books by Bernard Malamud and James Dickey and Joseph Heller and many other first-rate patriots, are regularly thrown out of public-school libraries by school board members, who commonly say that they have not actually read the books, but that they have it on good authority that the books are bad for children. • • • My novel Slaughterhouse-Five was actually burned in a furnace by a school janitor in Drake, North Dakota, on instructions from the school committee there, and the school board made public statements about the unwholesomeness of the book. Even by the standards of Queen Victoria, the only offensive line in the entire novel is this: “Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker.” This is spoken by an American antitank gunner to an unarmed American chaplain’s assistant during the Battle of the Bulge in Europe in December 1944, the largest single defeat of American arms (the Confederacy excluded) in history. The chaplain’s assistant had attracted enemy fire. So on November 16, 1973, I wrote as follows to Charles McCarthy of Drake, North Dakota: Dear Mr. McCarthy: I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school. Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am. I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews.
We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace? I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer. If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us. After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes—but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad
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citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that. I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own. If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the education of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books—books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive. Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real. • • • That was seven years ago. There has so far been no reply. At this very moment, as I write in New York City, Slaughterhouse-Five has been banned from school libraries not fifty miles from here. A legal battle begun several years ago rages on. The school board in question has found lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment tooth and nail. There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord. At the start of that particular litigation, on March 24th of 1976, I wrote a comment for the OpEd page of the Long Island edition of The New York Times. It went like this: A school board has denounced some books again—out in Levittown this time. One of the books was mine. I hear about un-American nonsense like this twice a year or so. One time out in North Dakota, the books were actually burned in a furnace. I had a laugh. It was such an ignorant, dumb, super-
stitious thing to do. It was so cowardly, too—to make a great show of attacking artifacts. It was like St. George attacking bedspreads and cuckoo clocks. Yes, and St. Georges like that seem to get elected or appointed to school committees all the time. They are actually proud of their illiteracy. They imagine that they are somehow celebrating the bicentennial when they boast, as some did in Levittown, that they hadn’t actually read the books they banned. Such lunks are often the backbone of volunteer fire departments and the United States Infantry and cake sales and so on, and they have been thanked often enough for that. But they have no business supervising the educations of children in a free society. They are just too bloody stupid. Here is how I propose to end book-banning in this country once and for all: Every candidate for school committee should be hooked up to a lie-detector and asked this question: “Have you read a book from start to finish since high school? Or did you even read a book from start to finish in high school?” If the truthful answer is “no,” then the candidate should be told politely that he cannot get on the school committee and blow off his big bazoo about how books make children crazy. Whenever ideas are squashed in this country, literate lovers of the American experiment write careful and intricate explanations of why all ideas must be allowed to live. It is time for them to realize that they are attempting to explain America at its bravest and most optimistic to orangutans. From now on, I intend to limit my discourse with dim-witted Savonarolas to this advice: “Have somebody read the First Amendment to the United States Constitution out loud to you, you God damned fool!” Well—the American Civil Liberties Union or somebody like that will come to the scene of trouble, as they always do. They will explain what is in the Constitution, and to whom it applies. They will win. And there will be millions who are bewildered and heartbroken by the legal victory, who think some things should never be said—especially about religion. They are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hi ho.
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• • • Why is it so ordinary for American citizens to show such scorn for the First Amendment? I discussed that some at a fund raiser for the American Civil Liberties Union at Sands Point, New York, out on Long Island, on September 16, 1979. The house where I spoke, incidentally, was said to be the model for Gatsby’s house in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I saw no reason to doubt the claim. I said this in such a setting: “I will not speak directly to the ejection of my book Slaughterhouse-Five from the school libraries of Island Trees. I have a vested interest. I wrote the book, after all, so why wouldn’t I argue that it is less repulsive than the school board says? “I will speak of Thomas Aquinas instead. I will tell you my dim memories of what he said about the hierarchy of laws on this planet, which was flat at the time. The highest law, he said, was divine law, God’s law. Beneath that was natural law, which I suppose would include thunderstorms, and our right to shield our children from poisonous ideas, and so on. “And the lowest law was human law. “Let me clarify this scheme by comparing its parts to playing cards. Enemies of the Bill of Rights do the same sort of thing all the time, so why shouldn’t we? Divine law, then, is an ace. Natural law is a king. The Bill of Rights is a lousy queen. “The Thomist hierarchy of laws is so far from being ridiculous that I have never met anybody who did not believe in it right down to the marrow of his or her bones. Everybody knows that there are laws with more grandeur than those which are printed in our statute books. The big trouble is that there is so little agreement as to how those grander laws are worded. Theologians can give us hints of the wording, but it takes a dictator to set them down just right—to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. A man who had been a mere corporal in the army did that for Germany and then for all of Europe, you may remember, not long ago. There was nothing he did not know about divine and natural law. He had fistfuls of aces and kings to play. “Meanwhile, over on this side of the Atlantic, we were not playing with a full deck, as they say. Because of our Constitution, the highest card anybody had to play was a lousy queen, contemptible human
law. That remains true today. I myself celebrate that incompleteness, since it has obviously been so good for us. I support the American Civil Liberties Union because it goes to court to insist that our government officials be guided by nothing grander than human law. Every time the circulation of this idea or that one is discouraged by an official in this country, that official is scorning the Constitution, and urging all of us to participate in far grander systems, again: divine or natural law. “Cannot we, as libertarians, hunger for at least a little natural law? Can’t we learn from nature at least, without being burdened by another person’s idea of God? “Certainly. Granola never harmed anybody, nor the birds and bees—not to mention milk. God is unknowable, but nature is explaining herself all the time. What has she told us so far? That blacks are obviously inferior to whites, for one thing, and intended for menial work on white man’s terms. This clear lesson from nature, we should remind ourselves from time to time, allowed Thomas Jefferson to own slaves. Imagine that. “What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law. “Most teachers and parents and guardians do not teach this vital lesson because they themselves never learned it, or because they dare not. Why dare they not? People can get into a lot of trouble in this country, and often have to be defended by the American Civil Liberties Union, for laying the groundwork for the lesson, which is this: That no one really understands nature or God. It is my willingness to lay this groundwork, and not sex or violence, which has got my poor book in such trouble in Island Trees—and in Drake, North Dakota, where the book was burned, and in many other communities too numerous to mention. “I have not said that our government is anti-nature and anti-God. I have said that it is non-nature and non-God, for very good reasons that could curl your hair. “Well—all good things must come to an end, they say. So American freedom will come to an end, too, sooner or later. How will it end? As all freedoms end: by the surrender of our destinies to the highest
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laws. “To return to my foolish analogy of playing cards: kings and aces will be played. Nobody else will have anything higher than a queen. “There will be a struggle between those holding kings and aces. The struggle will not end, not that the rest of us will care much by then, until somebody plays the ace of spades. Nothing beats the ace of spades. “I thank you for your attention.” • • • I spoke at Gatsby’s house in the afternoon. When I got back to my own house in New York City, I wrote a letter to a friend in the Soviet Union, Felix Kuznetzov, a distinguished critic and teacher, and an officer in the Union of Writers of the USSR in Moscow. The date on the letter is the same as the date of the Sands Point oration. There was a time when I might have been halfbombed on booze when writing such a letter so late at night, a time when I might have reeked of mustard gas and roses as I punched the keys. But I don’t drink anymore. Never in my life have I written anything for publication while sozzled. But I certainly used to write a lot of letters that way. No more. Be that as it may, I was sober then and am sober now, and Felix Kuznetzov and I had become friends during the previous summer—at an ecumenical meeting in New York City, sponsored by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, of American and Soviet literary persons, about ten to a side. The American delegation was headed by Norman Cousins, and included myself and Edward Albee and Arthur Miller and William Styron and John Updike. All of us had been published in the Soviet Union. I am almost entirely in print over there—with the exception of Mother Night and Jailbird. Few, if any, of the Soviet delegates had had anything published here, and so their work was unknown to us. We Americans were told by the Soviets that we should be embarrassed that their country published so much of our work, and that we published so little of theirs. Our reply was that we would work to get more of them published over here, but that we felt, too, that the USSR could easily have put together a delegation whose works were admired and published here—and that we could easily have put to-
gether a delegation so unfamiliar to them that its members could have been sewer commissioners from Fresno, as far as anybody in the Soviet Union knew. Felix Kuznetzov and I got along very well, at any rate. I had him over to my house, and we sat in my garden out back and talked away the better part of an afternoon. But then, after everybody went home, there was some trouble in the Soviet Union about the publication of an outlaw magazine called Metropole. Most of Metropole’s writers and editors were young, impatient with the strictures placed on their writings by old poops. Nothing in Metropole, incidentally, was nearly as offensive as calling a chaplain’s assistant a “dumb motherfucker.” But the Metropole people were denounced, and the magazine was suppressed, and ways were discussed for making life harder for anyone associated with it. So Albee and Styron and Updike and I sent a cable to the Writers’ Union, saying that we thought it was wrong to penalize writers for what they wrote, no matter what they wrote. Felix Kuznetzov made an official reply on behalf of the union, giving the sense of a large meeting in which distinguished writer after distinguished writer testified that those who wrote for Metropole weren’t really writers, that they were pornographers and other sorts of disturbers of the peace, and so on. He asked that his reply be published in The New York Times, and it was published there. Why not? And I privately wrote to Kuznetzov as follows: Dear Professor Kuznetzov—dear Felix— I thank you for your prompt and frank and thoughtful letter of August 20, and for the supplementary materials which accompanied it. I apologize for not replying in your own beautiful language, and I wish that we both might have employed from the first a more conversational tone in our discussion of the Metropole affair. I will try to recapture the amiable, brotherly mood of our long talk in my garden here about a year ago. You speak of us in your letter as “American authors.” We do not feel especially American in this instance, since we spoke only for ourselves—without consulting with any American institution whatsoever. We are simply “authors” in this case, expressing loyalty to the great and vulnerable family of writers throughout the world. You and all other members
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of the Union of Writers surely have the same family feelings. Those of us who sent the cable are so far from being organized that I have no idea what sorts of replies the others may be making to you. As you must know, your response to our cable was printed recently in The New York Times, and perhaps elsewhere. The controversy has attracted little attention. It is a matter of interest, seemingly, only to other writers. Nobody cares much about writers but writers. And, if it weren’t for a few of us like the signers of the cable, I wonder if there would be anybody to care about writers—no matter how much trouble they were in. Should we, too, stop caring? Well—I understand that our cultures are so different that we can never agree about freedom of expression. It is natural that we should disagree, and perhaps even commendable. What you may not know about our own culture is that writers such as those who signed the cable are routinely attacked by fellow citizens as being pornographers or corrupters of children and celebrators of violence and persons of no talent and so on. In my own case, such charges are brought against my works in court several times a year, usually by parents who, for religious or political reasons, do not want their children to read what I have to say. The parents, incidentally, often find their charges supported by the lowest courts. The charges so far have been invariably overthrown in higher courts, those closer to the soul of the Constitution of the United States. Please convey the contents of this letter to my brothers and sisters in the Writers’ Union, as we conveyed your letter to The New York Times. This letter is specifically for you, to do with as you please. I am not sending carbon copies to anyone. It has not even been read by my wife. That homely detail, if brought to the attention of the Writers’ Union, might help its members to
understand what I do not think is at all well understood now: That we are not nationalists, taking part in some cold-war enterprise. We simply care deeply about how things are going for writers here, there, and everywhere. Even when they are declared non-writers, as we have been, we continue to care. • • • Kuznetzov gave me a prompt and likewise private answer. It was gracious and humane. I could assume that we were still friends. He said nothing against his union or his government. Neither did he say anything to discourage me from feeling that writers everywhere, good and bad, were all first cousins—first cousins, at least. And all the argle-bargling that goes on between educated persons in the United States and the Soviet Union is so touching and comical, really, as long as it does not lead to war. It draws its energy, in my opinion, from a desperate wish on both sides that each other’s Utopias should work much better than they do. We want to tinker with theirs, to make it work much better than it does—so that people there, for example, can say whatever they please without fear of punishment. They want to tinker with ours, so that everybody here who wants a job can have one, and so that we don’t have to tolerate the sales of fist-fucking films and snuff films and so on. Neither Utopia now works much better than the Page typesetting machine, in which Mark Twain invested and lost a fortune. That beautiful contraption actually set type just once, when only Twain and the inventor were watching. Twain called all the other investors to see this miracle, but, by the time they got there, the inventor had taken the machine all apart again. It never ran again. Peace. 1981
SOURCE: Vonnegut, Kurt. “The First Amendment.” Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage, Dial Press, 2011, pp. 1-15. Composition II • Instructor-provided Readings • Loibner-Waitkus • PAGE 19
A MOMENT IN TROY
by Wiława Szymborska
Little girls— skinny, resigned to freckles that won’t go away, not turning any heads as they walk across the eyelids of the world, looking just like Mom or Dad, and sincerely horrified by it— in the middle of dinner, in the middle of a book, while studying the mirror, may suddenly be taken off to Troy. In the grand boudoir of a wink they all turn into beautiful Helens. They ascend the royal staircase in the rustling of silk and admiration. They feel light. They all know that beauty equals rest, that lips mold the speech’s meaning, and gestures sculpt themselves in inspired nonchalance. Their small faces worth dismissing envoys for extend proudly on necks that merit countless sieges. Those tall, dark movie stars, their girlfriends’ older brothers, the teacher from art class, alas, they must all be slain. Little girls observe disaster from a tower of smiles. Little girls wring their hands in intoxicating mock despair.
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Little girls against a backdrop of destruction, with flaming towns for tiaras, in earrings of pandemic lamentation. Pale and tearless. Triumphant. Sated with the view. Dreading only the inevitable moment of return. Little girls returning. 1962
SOURCE: Szymborska, Wisława. “A Moment in Troy.” Poems: New and Collected,1957-1997, translated by Stanisław Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, Harcourt Brace, 1998, pp. 31-32. Composition II • Instructor-provided Readings • Loibner-Waitkus • PAGE 21
FOUR A.M.
by Wiława Szymborska
The hour between night and day. The hour between toss and turn. The hour of thirty-year-olds. The hour swept clean for roosters’ crowing. The hour the earth takes back its warm embrace. The hour of cool drafts from extinguished stars. The hour of do-we-vanish-too-without-a-trace. Empty hour. Hollow. Vain. Rock bottom of all the other hours. No one feels fine at four a.m. If ants feel fine at four a.m., we’re happy for the ants. And let five a.m. come if we’ve got to go on living. 1957
SOURCE: Szymborska, Wisława. “Four A.M.” Poems: New and Collected,1957-1997, translated by Stanisław Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, Harcourt Brace, 1998, p. 9. Composition II • Instructor-provided Readings • Loibner-Waitkus • PAGE 22
THE DEER AT PROVIDENCIA
by Annie Dillard
I
It here were four of us North Americans in the jungle, in the Ecuadorain jungle on the banks of the Napo River in the Amazon watershed. The other three were big-city men. We stayed in tents in one riverside village, and visited others. At the village called Providencia we saw a sight that moved us all, but shocked the men. • • • The first thing we saw when we climbed the riverbank to the village of Providencia was the deer. It was roped to a tree on the grass clearing near the thatch shelter where we would eat. The deer was small, about the size of a whitetail fawn, and apparently full-grown. It had a rope around its neck and three feet caught in the rope. Someone said that the dogs had caught it in the morning and the villagers were going to cook and eat it that night. The clearing lay at the edge of the little thatchedhut village. We could see the villagers going on about their business, scattering feed corn for the hens near their homes, and wandering down paths to the river to bathe. The village headman was our host; he stood beside us as we watched the deer struggle. Several village boys were interested in the deer; they formed part of the circle we made around it in the clearing. So also did the four men from Quito who were guiding us around the jungle. Pepe was the real guide. Few of the very different people standing in this circle had a common language. We watched the deer, and no one said much. The deer lay on its side at the rope’s very end, so the rope lacked slack to let it rest its head in the dust. It was “pretty,” delicate of bone like all deer, and thin-skinned for the tropics. Its skin color looked virtually hairless, in fact, and almost translucent, like a membrane. Its neck was no thicker than my wrist; it had been rubbed open on the rope, and gashed. Trying to get itself free of the rope, the deer had cut its own neck with its hooves. The raw underside of its neck showed red stripes and some bruises bleeding inside the skin. Now three of its feet were hooked in the rope under its jaw. It could not stand, of course,
on one leg, so it could not move to slacken the rope and ease the pull on its throat and enable it to rest its head. Repeatedly the deer paused, motionless, its eyes veiled, with only its rib cage in motion, and its breaths the only sound. Then, after I would think, “It has given up; now it will die,” it would heave. The rope twanged; the leaves clattered; the deer’s free foot beat the ground again. We stepped back and held our breaths. It thrashed, kicking, but with only the one leg. The other three legs tightened inside the rope’s loop. Its hip jerked; its spine shook. Its eyes rolled; its tongue, thick with spit, pushed in and out. Then it rested again. We watched this for fifteen minutes. At one point three young village boys charged in to release its trapped legs, then jumped back to the circle of people. But instantly the deer scratched up its neck with its hooves again and snared its forelegs right back in the rope. It was like Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby. We watched the deer from the circle, and then we drifted on to lunch. Our palm-roofed shelter stood on a grassy promontory from which we could see the deer tied to the tree, pigs and hens walking under village houses, and black-and-white cattle standing in the river. There was a slight breeze. Lunch, which was the second and better lunch we had that day, was hot and fried. There was a big fish called doncella, a kind of catfish, dipped whole in corn flour and beaten egg, then deep-fried. With our fingers we pulled soft fragments of it from its sides to our plates, and ate; it was delicate fish-flesh, fresh and mild. Someone found the roe, and I ate that too—it was fat and stronger, like egg yolk, naturally enough, and warm. There was also a stew of meat in shreds with rice and pale brown gravy. I had asked what kind of deer it was tied to the tree; Pepe had answered in Spanish, “Gama.” Now they told us this, too, was gama, stewed. I suspect the word means merely game. At any rate, I heard that the village dogs had cornered another deer just yesterday, and it was the deer which we were now eating in full sight of the
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whole article. It was good. I was surprised at its tenderness. But it is a fact that high levels of lactic acid, which builds up in muscle tissues during exertion, tenderizes. After the fish and meat we ate bananas fried in chunks and served on a tray; they were sweet and full of flavor. I felt terrific. My shirt was wet and cool from swimming; I had had a night’s sleep, two decent walks, three meals, and a swim—everything tasted good. From time to time, one or another of us would look beyond our shaded roof to the sunny spot where the deer was still convulsing in the dust. Finally, our meal completed, we walked around the deer and back to the boats. • • • That night I learned that while all of us had been watching the deer, the others were also watching me. We four North Americans had grown close in the jungle in a way that was not the usual artificial intimacy of travelers. We liked one another. We stayed up all that night talking, murmuring, as though we rocked on hammocks slung above time. The others—from big cities: New York, Washington, Boston—remarked now on the lack of expression on my face earlier, as I watched the deer, or the lack, at any rate, of any expression they expected. They had looked to see how I, the youngest of us and the only woman, was taking the sight of the deer’s struggles. I look detached, I don’t know. I was thinking. I remember feeling very old and energetic. I might have said that, like Thoreau, I have traveled widely in Roanoke, Virginia. I eat meat. These things are not issues. They are mysteries. Gentlemen of the city, what surprises you? That there is suffering here, or that I know it? We lay in the tent and talked. “If it had been my wife,” one man said with special vigor, amazed, “she wouldn’t have cared what was going on; she would have dropped everything right at that moment and gone in the village from here to there, she would not have stopped until that animal was out of its suffering one way or another. She couldn’t bear to see a creature in agony like that.” I nodded. • • •
Now I am home. When I wake I comb my hair before the mirror above my dresser. Every morning for the past two years I see in that mirror, beside my sleep-softened face, the blackened face of a burnt man. It is a wire-service photograph clipped from a newspaper and taped to my mirror. The caption reads: “Alan McDonald in Miami hospital bed.” All you can see in the photograph is a smudged triangle of a face from his eyelids to his lower lip; the rest is bandages. You cannot see the expression in his eyes; the bandages shade them. The story, headed “Man Burned for Second Time,” begins: “Why does God hate me? Alan McDonald asked from his hospital bed. “When the gunpowder went off, I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘No, God couldn’t do this to me again.’” He was in a burn ward in Miami, in serious condition. I do not even know if he lived. I wrote him a letter at the time, cringing. He had been burned before, thirteen years previously, by flaming gasoline. For years he had been having his body restored and his face remade in dozens of operations. He had been a boy, and then a burnt boy. He had already been stunned by what could happen, by what life could veer. Once I read that people who survive bad burns tend to go crazy; they have a high suicide rate. Medicine cannot ease their pain; drugs just leak away, soaking the sheets, because there is no skin to hold them in. The people just lie there and weep. Later they kill themselves. They had not known, before they were burned, that the world included such suffering, that life could permit them such pain. This time a bowl of gunpowder had exploded on McDonald. “I didn’t realize what had happened at first,” he recounted. “And then I heard that sound from thirteen years ago. I was burning. I rolled to put the fire out and I thought, ‘Oh God, not again.’ “If my friend hadn’t been there, I would have jumped into a canal with a rock around my neck.” His wife concludes the piece, “Man, it just isn’t fair.” • • • I read the whole clipping every morning. This is the Big Time here, every minute of it. Will someone please explain to Alan McDonald in his dignity, to
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the deer at Providencia in his dignity, what is going on? And copy me on it. • • •
the last time, I said to Pepe, with a glance at the deer, “Pobrecito”—”Poor little thing.” But I was trying out Spanish. I knew at the time it was a ridiculous thing to say.
When we walked by the deer at Providencia for
SOURCE: Dillard, Annie. “The Deer at Providencia.” Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, Harper Perennial, 1992, pp. 78-84. Composition II • Instructor-provided Readings • Loibner-Waitkus • PAGE 25
1982