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

History.

Accident after accident has made Tarkington what it is today. Who would dare to predict what it will be in 2021,
only 20 years from now? The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.
As the tag line of my favorite dirty joke would have it: “Keep your hat on. We could wind up miles from here.”

If Henry Moellenkamp had not come out of his mother’s womb dyslexic, Tarkington College wouldn’t even
have been called Tarkington College. It would have gone on being The Mohiga Valley Free Institute, which
would have died right along with the wagon factory and the carpet factory and the brewery when the
railroads and highways connecting the East and West were built far to the north and south of Scipio—so
as not to bridge the lake, so as not to have to penetrate the deep and dark virgin hardwood forest, now the Iroquois
National Forest, to the east and south of here.

If Henry Moellenkamp hadn’t come out of his mother’s womb dyslexic, and if that mother hadn’t been a
Tarkington and so known about the little college on Lake Mohiga, this library would never have been built and
ifiled with 800,000 bound volumes. When I was a professor here, that was 70,000 more bound volumes than
Swarthmore College had! Among small colleges,
this library used to be second only to the I at Oberlin, which had 1,000,000 bound volumes.
So what is this structure in which I sit now, thanks to Time and Luck? It is nothing less, friends and neighbors,
than the greatest prison library in the history of crime and punishment!
It is very lonely in here. Hello? Hello?

I might have said the same sort of thing back when this was an 800,000-bound-volume college library: “It is very
lonely in here. Hello? Hello?”

I have just looked up Harvard University. It has 13,000,000 bound volumes now. What a read!
And almost every book written for or about the ruling class.

If Henry Moellenkamp hadn’t come out of his mother’s womb dyslexic, there would never have been a tower in
which to hang the Lutz Carillon.
Those bells might never have gotten to reverberate in the valley or anywhere. They probably would have been
melted up and made back into weapons during World War I.

If Henry Moellenkamp had not come out of his mother’s womb dyslexic, these heights above Scipio might have
been all darkness on the cold winter night 2 years ago, with Lake Mohiga frozen hard as a parking lot, when 10,000
prisoners at Athena were suddenly set free.
Instead, there was a little galaxy of beckoning lights up here.




4
egardless of whether Henry Moellenkamp came out of his mother’s womb dyslexic or not, I
R was born in Wilmington, Delaware, 18 months before this country joined the fighting in World War II. I have
not seen Wilmington since. That is where they keep my birth certificate. I was the only child of a housewife
and, as I’ve said, a chemical engineer. My father was then employed by E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company, a
manufacturer of high explosives, among other things.
When I was 2 years old, we moved to Midland City, Ohio, where a washing-machine company named Robo-
Magic Corporation was beginning to make bomb-release mechanisms and swivel mounts for machine guns on B-I 7
bombers. The plastics industry was then in its infancy, and Father was sent to Robo-Magic to determine what