"Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

taught in the afternoons. In the mornings I wrote. I was not be disturbed. I was working on my
famous book about Dresden.
And somewhere in there a nice man named Seymour Lawrence gave me a three-book contract, and I
said, 'O.K., the first of the three will be my famous book about Dresden.'
The friends of Seymour Lawrence call him 'Sam.' And I say to Sam now: 'Sam-here's the book.'

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about
a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again.
Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-tee-weet?'



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I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and
that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express
contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

As I've said I recently went back to Dresden with my friend O'Hare. We had a million laughs in
Hamburg and West Berlin and East Berlin and Vienna and Salzburg and Helsinki, and in Leningrad,
too. It was very good for me, because I saw a lot of authentic backgrounds for made-up stories
which I will write later on. One of them will be Russian Baroque and another will be No Kissing
and another will be Dollar Bar and another will be If the Accident Will, and so on.
And so on.

There was a Lufthansa plane that was supposed to fly from Philadelphia to Boston to Frankfurt.
O'Hare was supposed to get on in Philadelphia and I was supposed to get on in Boston, and off we'd
go. But Boston was socked in, so the plane flew straight to Frankfurt from Philadelphia. And I
became a non-person in the Boston Fog, and Lufthansa put me in a limousine with some other non-
persons and sent us to a motel for a non-night.
The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the electric
clocks, but the wind-up kind, too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year
would pass, and then it would twitch again.
There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling., I had to believe whatever clocks said-
and calendars.

I had two books with me, which I'd meant to read on the plane. One was Words for the Wind, by
Theodore Roethke, and this is what I found in there:
I wake to steep, and take my waking slow.
I feet my late in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
My other book was Erika Ostrovsky's Céline and His Vision. Céline was a brave French soldier
in the First World War-until his skull was cracked. After that he couldn't sleep, and there were
noises in his head. He became a doctor, and he treated poor people in the daytime, and he wrote
grotesque novels all night. No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote.