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

My longest experience with common decency, surely, has been with my older brother, my only
brother, Bernard, who is an atmospheric scientist in the State University of New York at Albany.
He is a widower, raising two young sons all by himself. He does it well. He has three grown-
up sons besides.
We were given very different sorts of minds at birth. Bernard could never be a writer. I could
never be a scientist. And, since we make our livings with our minds, we tend to think of them as
gadgets — separate from our awarenesses, from our central selves.




We have hugged each other maybe three or four times — on birthdays, very likely, and clumsily.
We have never hugged in moments of grief.




The minds we have been given enjoy the same sorts of jokes, at any rate — Mark Twain stuff,
Laurel and Hardy stuff.
They are equally disorderly, too.
Here is an anecdote about my brother, which, with minor variations, could be told truthfully
about me:
Bernard worked for the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, for
a while, where he discovered that silver iodide could precipitate certain sorts of clouds as snow
or rain. His laboratory was a sensational mess, however, where a clumsy stranger could die in a
thousand different ways, depending on where he stumbled.
The company had a safety officer who nearly swooned when he saw this jungle of deadfalls
and snares and hair-trigger booby traps. He bawled out my brother.
My brother said this to him, tapping his own forehead with his fingertips: "If you think this
laboratory is bad, you should see what it's like in here."
And so on.
I told my brother one time that whenever I did repair work around the house, I lost all my tools
before I could finish the job.
"You're lucky," he said. "I always lose whatever I'm working on."
We laughed.




But, because of the sorts of minds we were given at birth, and in spite of their disorderliness,
Bernard and I belong to artificial extended families which allow us to claim relatives all over the
world.
He is a brother to scientists everywhere. I am a brother to writers everywhere.
This is amusing and comforting to both of us. It is nice.
It is lucky, too, for human beings need all the relatives they can get — as possible donors or
receivers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.