from
Bagombo Snuff Box
Uncollected Short Fiction
by
Kurt Vonnegut

I returned to Dresden, incidentally, the setting for Slaughterhouse-Five, on October 7th, 1998. I was taken down into the cellar where I and about a hundred other American POWs survived a firestorm that suffocated or incinerated 135,000 or so other human beings. It reduced the “Florence of the Elbe” to a jagged moonscape.

While I was down in that cellar again, this thought came to me: “Because I have lived so long, I am one of the few persons on Earth who saw an Atlantis before it disappeared forever beneath the waves.”

Dad is tired and blue. Dad starts to read. His pulse and breathing slow down. His troubles drop away, and so on.

Yes! And our little domestic playlet, true to life in the 1930s, dear reader, proves exactly what? It proves that a short story, because of its physiological and psychological effects on a human being, is more closely related to Buddhist styles of meditation than it is to any other form of narrative entertainment.

What you have in this volume, then, and in every other collection of short stories, is a bunch of Buddhist catnaps.

Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The secret papers in the safe weren’t secrets. They said what had been known for centuries: Given fundamental physics, it follows that a projectile fired into space in direction x, at y miles per hour, will travel in the arc z. Dr. Groszinger modified the equation: Given fundamental physics and one billion dollars.

Impending war had offered him the opportunity to try the experiment.

Maybe dentists have rougher client relationships, but I doubt it. Give a man a choice between having his teeth or a real estate salesman’s commission extracted, and he’ll choose the pliers and novocaine every time.

“He’s blown every dime of it on parties, nightclubbing, his house, and clothes for his wife,” said Hal.

“Hooray,” I said. “That’s the investment advice I always wanted to give, but nobody would pay for it.”

Most married women won’t meet an old beau for cocktails, send him a Christmas card, or even look him straight in the eye. But if they happen to need something an old beau sells—anything from an appendectomy to venetian blinds—they’ll come bouncing back into his life, all pink and smiling, to get it for wholesale or less.

If a Don Juan were to go into the household appliance business, his former conquests would ruin him inside of a year.

“I never want to see another musician as long as I live,” she said.

“In that case,” he said, “close your eyes and I’ll tiptoe away.” But he didn’t leave.

“That’s your band—playing tonight?” she said. They could hear the music quite clearly.

“That’s right,” he said.

“You can stay,” she said.

“Pardon me?” he said.

“You’re no musician,” she said, “or that band would have made you curl up and die.”

“You’re the first person who ever listened to it,” he said.

Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith and William Griffith Wilson were in Akron in 1935 when they devised the Twelve Steps to sobriety of Alcoholics Anonymous. By comparison with Smith and Wilson, Sigmund Freud was a piker when it came to healing dysfunctional minds and lives.

New York and Boston and other ports on the Atlantic have Europe for an influential, often importunate neighbor. Middle Westerners do not. Many of us of European ancestry are on that account ignorant of our families’ past in the Old World and the culture there. Our only heritage is American. When Germans captured me during the Second World War, one asked me, “Why are you making war against your brothers?” I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. . . .

Anglo-Americans and African-Americans whose ancestors came to the Middle West from the South commonly have a much more compelling awareness of a homeland elsewhere in the past than do I—in Dixie, of course, not the British Isles or Africa.

What geography can give all Middle Westerners, along with the fresh water and topsoil, if they let it, is awe for a fertile continent stretching forever in all directions.

Makes you religious. Takes your breath away.