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The president of the local club is a grumpy greybeard
His crankiness could be correlated with "increased intelligence" according
to new research, which says older people with more intelligence tend to be
crabbier than those with lesser intelligence. Folks with above-average IQs
tend to be sunnier when they are younger. They're more likely to be open to
new situations but with age they turn into curmudgeons.
The moral is
that the kinds of open-ness younger people need to absorb new information
may be less meaningful to older and smarter adults, who've been there and
done that, and acquired a lot of knowledge. The other possibility may be
that the irascible oldies were just plain unlucky: had they been exposed to
the dark comic talent of Kurt Vonnegut, who died on Thursday at the age of
84, their souls might have been saved for the Sun! Mr. Vonnegut's self-confessed goal
in writing novels was "to catch people before they become generals, and
senators and presidents" ---- just the sort of smart but older eminences
that we're talking about.
Mr. Vonnegut also said he wanted to "poison the minds of these
people with potential prickles with humanity and to encourage them to make a
better world". For Mr. Vonnegut, who wrote such classics as
Slaughter-house-5 and Cat's Cradle, the only possible redemption for the
madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The
title character in his 1965 novel, God bless You, Mr. Rosewater, summed up
his philosophy thus: "Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the
summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded.
At the outside, babies you've got about hundred years here. There's
only one rule that now of, babies, --- 'god damn it, you've got to be kind."
How every, he's mostly likely to be remembered for his Zen-like
phrase "so it goes". This ran through his books, appearing whenever there
was death and dying. ("Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died too.
So it goes. And every day my government gives me count of corpses created by
military science in Vietnam. So it goes.") It became a catchphrase of the
antiwar activists everywhere who treasured Mr. Vonnegut as " the closest
thing they had to Voltaire". Now that he's gone (So it goes), remember to be
kind. What if you cannot ? Then just pretend. As he said, we are what we
pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. |
