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Show CHRYSALIS PAGE 102 I have a pencil-holder Remy made, an orange juice can decorated with blue yarn and yellow construction paper. Thoreau's Walden, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, books by Ray Bradbury and Issac Asimov, Harlan Ellison and Kurt Vonnegut lay in comfortable disarray beside the empty skull of a horse we found baking in the Arizona sun one summer. I want to know the nature of light, and electricity, and black holes. I want to figure out the great WHY of everything. There is not enough time to know everything. I don't want to die - so very much I don't want to die. If I were given a choice of how long I might live with my immediate mental and physical equipment, I would certainly decide on a good deal longer than the three score and ten alloted. Or less. I like to think of people as the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five saw them - as continuous beings, not unlike long caterpillars, with fat baby's legs at one end and long, ancient legs at the other - beings forever all-one-piece, integrated and entire. Then one would be able, at will, to re-assume any point in the time of one's life (which is what Billy Pilgrim does throughout the book). I'd like that. |