Books of Bokonon - Don't be a fool! Close this at once! Nothing but foma!

[Honey]

The Books of Bokonon

Edited by Eugene Wallingford
wallingf@cs.uni.edu
Editor's Introduction

In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., created a new religion, Bokononism. The holy scripture of Bokononism was the ever-growing "Books of Bokonon", written by Bokonon -- a British Episcopalian Negro from the island of Tobago whose real name was Lionel Boyd Johnson [ 48 ] -- as a way to distract the people of San Lorenzo from their pitiful lives. What is sacred to Bokononists? Not God; just one thing: man. [ 94 ]

All material contained below was written by Kurt Vonnegut and scattered throughout Cat's Cradle wherever it best suited the novel. I have merely tabulated -- as best I could -- his snippets into an order that one might find in a real copy of the Books of Bokonon. I have also tried to cross-reference these snippets to the numbered sections of the novel, where you may read of scripture in the context of Vonnegut's story.
Index to The Books of Bokonon

* The Books
o The First Book
o The Sixth Book
o The Seventh Book
o The Fourteenth Book

* The Calypsos
* The Autobiographical Section
* Unreferenced Verses and Stories
* The Final Sentence of The Books of Bokonon

* Dictionary of Terms
* Also by Bokonon

The First Book

Warning from title page: Don't be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma!
[ 118 ]

Verse 1: All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies. [ 4 ]

Verses 2-4 (?): In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.

"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.

"Certainly," said man.

"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.

And He went away. [ 118 ]

Verse 5: Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy. [ frontispiece ]

The Sixth Book

[ This book "is devoted to pain, in particular to tortures inflicted by men on men". [ 118 ] ]

If I am ever put to death on the hook, expect a very human performance.

In any case, there's bound to be much crying.
But the oubliette alone will let you think while dying.

The Seventh Book: Bokonon's Republic

[ "...a whole book about Utopias". [ 126 ] ]

The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world.

Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that we can write our Constitution.

The Fourteenth Book

[ A short book with a long title. [ 110 ] ]

Title: What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?

Only verse: Nothing.

The Calypsos

On Dynamic Tension [ 47 ]

"Papa" Monzano, he's so very bad
But without bad "Papa" I would be so sad;
Because without "Papa's" badness,
Tell me, if you would,
How could wicked old Bokonon
Ever, ever look good?

On the Natives of San Lorenzo: [ 56 ]

Oh, a very sorry people, yes,
Did I find here.
Oh, they had no music,
And they had no beer.
And, oh, everywhere
Where they tried to perch
Belonged to Castle Sugar, Incorporated,
Or the Catholic church.

On the creation of Bokononism: [ 58 ]

I wanted all things
To seem to make some sense,
So we could all be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise.

On the end of the world: [ 119 ]

Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why just go ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod.

The Boko-maru Calypso [ 72 ]

We will touch our feet, yes,
Yes, for all we're worth,
And we will love each other, yes,
Yes, like we love our Mother Earth.

The Fourteenth Calypso [ 48 ]

When I was young
I was so gay and mean,
And I drank and chased the girls
Just like young St. Augustine.
Saint Augustine,
He got to be a saint.
So, if I get to be one, also,
Please. Mama, don't you faint.

The Fifty-third Calypso [ 2 ]

Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen--
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice--
So many different people
In the same device.

The Hundred-and-nineteenth Calypso [ 102 ]

"Where's my good old gang done gone?"
I heard a man say.
I whispered in that sad man's ear,
"Your gang's done gone away."

From the Autobiographical Section

A parable on the folly of pretending to discover, to understand [ 3 ]

I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be.

And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, "I'm sorry, but I never could read one of those things."

"Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God," I said, "and, when God finds a minute, I'm sure he'll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even you can understand."

She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed.

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he can see what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

Unreferenced Verses and Stories

Referring to one's karass:

Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass. [ 2 ]

If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons that person may be a member of your karass. [ 2 ]

Likes and dislikes have nothing to do with it. [ 9 ]

Referring to inevitability:

As it was meant to happen... [ 10 ]

Referring to the wampeter:

No karass is without a wampeter, just as no wheel is without a hub. [ 24 ]

Around and around and around we spin,
with feet of lead and wings of tin... [ 24 ]

Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god. [ 31 ]

Referring to a duprass:

A true duprass can't be invaded, not even by children born of such a union. [ 41 ]

Referring to a granfalloon:

If you wish to study a granfalloon,
Just remove the skin of a toy balloon. [ 42 ]

Regarding Jesus' "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's.":

"Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on." [ 46 ]

On his own re-birth

A fish pitched up
By the angry sea,
I gasped on land,
And I became me.

Be like a baby,
The Bible say,
So I stay like a baby
To this very day. [ 49 ]

On Mona Aamons Monzano:

Mona has the simplicity of the all. [ 64 ]

A poem on pretending to understand:

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?"

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand. [ 81 ]

On cosmology: [ 85 ]

"... wherein Borasisi, the sun, held Pabu, the moon, in his arms, and hoped that Pabu would bear him a fiery child.

But poor Pabu gave birth to children that were cold, that did not burn; and Borasisi threw them away in disgust. These were the planets, who circled their terrible father at a safe distance.

Then poor Pabu herself was cast away, and she went to live with her favorite child, which was Earth. Earth was Pabu's favorite because it had people on it; and the people looked up at her and loved her and sympathized.

Bokonon's opinion of his cosmology: [ 85 ]

Foma! Lies! A pack of foma!

On maturity: [ 88 ]

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.

On Mona's fate: [ 88 ]

Mona Aamons Monzano will marry the next President of San Lorenzo [after Papa Monzano].

On parting: [ 102 ]

It is never a mistake to say good-bye.

On love: [ 104 ]

A lover's a liar,
To himself he lies,
The truthful are loveless,
Like oysters their eyes!

On God: [ 107 ]

God never wrote a good play in his life.

On man's troubles: [ 110 ]

Sometimes the pool-pah exceeds the power of humans to comment.

On man's power to control: [ 111 ]

Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.

Also on man's power to control: [ ? ]

It is not possible to make a mistake.

[ Mona says this to John, and it is described as a "customary greeting given by all Bokononists when meeting a shy person." ]

On history: [ 113 ]

History! Read it and weep!

On religion: [ 118 ]

Of course it's trash!

On man's destiny: [ 119 ]

Today I will be a Bulgarian Minister of Education. Tomorrow I will be Helen of Troy.

We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodley do,
What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must;
Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,
Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.

On the ignorance of learned men: [ 124 ]

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

On "the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality,
and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it: [ 125 ]

Midget, midget, midget, how he struts and winks,
For he knows a man's as big as what he hopes and thinks!

The Final Sentence

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who. [ 127 ]

Dictionary of Terms from The Books of Bokonon

* The boko-maru is a Bokononist ritual for "the mingling of awarenesses". [ 72 ] It consists in two people extending their legs, thrusting their arms behind them for support, and putting their bare feet together. [ 91 ]

* Busy, busy, busy is what a Bokononist whispers "whenever [he] thinks about how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is." [ 32 ]

* Duffle is "the destiny of thousands upon thousands of persons when placed in the hands of a stuppa. [ 89 ]

* A duprass is "a karass composed of only two persons". The members of a duprass die within a week of each other. [ 41 ] A duprass "is a valuable instrument for gaining and developing, in the privacy of an interminable love affair, insights that are queer but true." It "is also a sweetly conceited establishment." [ 55 ]

* Foma are "lies" [ 118 ]; "harmless untruths" [ frontispiece ]; "a useful and harmless sort of horseshit". [ ?? ]

* A granfalloon is "a false karass, [...] a seeming team that [is] meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done." Examples of granfalloons are "the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows -- and any nation, anytime, anywhere. [ 42 ]

* A kan-kan is the instrument which brings one into his or her karass. [ 1 ]

* A karass is a "team [of people] that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing". [ 1 ] Humanity is organized into many such teams. One can try to discover "the limits of [one's] karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do ... but such investigations are bound to be incomplete." [ 2 ]

* Pool-pah is translated both as "shit storm" and "wrath of God". [ 110 ]

* To saroon is "to acquiese to the seeming demands of [one's] vin-dit." [ 90 ]

* A sin-wat is "a man who wants all of somebody's love. That's very bad." [ 93 ]

* sinookas are "the tendrils of [one's] life". [ 4 ]

* A stuppa is "a fogbound child". [ 89 ]

* A vin-dit is "a sudden, very personal shove in the direction of Bokononism". [ 34 ]

* A wampeter is "the pivot of a karass, around which the souls of the members of the karass revolve." A karass has two wampeters at any time, one waxing and one waning.
[ 24 ]

* A wrang-wrang is "a person who steers people away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang's own life, to an absurdity. [ 36 ]

* Zah-mah-ki-bo is "fate -- inevitable destiny". [ 82 ]

Also by Bokonon

The San Lorenzan National Anthem [ 63 ]
(Sung to the melody of 'Home on the Range'.)

Oh, ours is a land
Where the living is grand,
And the men are as fearless as sharks;
The women are pure,
And we always sure
That our children will all toe their marks.
San, San Lo-ren-zo!
What a rich, lucky island are we!
Our enemies quail,
For they know they will fail
Against people so reverent and free.

A Poem on the Creation of Bokononism [ 78 ]

So I said good-bye to government,
And I gave my reason:
That a really good religion
Is a form of treason.

The Last Rites of the Bokononism [ 99 ]
(Each line is said once by the person giving the rites and then repeated by the dying person.)

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.

On a Boulder near the Post-Ice Nine Mass Suicide [ 120 ]

To whom it may concern: These people around you are almost all of the survivors on San Lorenzo of the winds that followed the freezing of the sea. These people made a captive of the spurious holy man named Bokonon. They brought him here, placed him at their center, and commanded him to tell them exactly what God Almighty was up to and what they should now do. The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because he was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.
Bokonon

Eugene Wallingford ===== February 14, 2003

Dictionary of Terms from The Books of Bokonon

•   The boko-maru is a Bokononist ritual for "the mingling of awarenesses". It consists in two people extending their legs, thrusting their arms behind them for support, and putting their bare feet together.
•   Busy, busy, busy is what a Bokononist whispers "whenever [he] thinks about how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is."
•   Duffle is "the destiny of thousands upon thousands of persons when placed in the hands of a stuppa."
•   A duprass is "a karass composed of only two persons". The members of a duprass die within a week of each other. A duprass "is a valuable instrument for gaining and developing, in the privacy of an interminable love affair, insights that are queer but true." It "is also a sweetly conceited establishment."
•   Foma are "lies"; "harmless untruths" [ frontispiece ]; "a useful and harmless sort of horseshit".
•   A granfalloon is "a false karass, [...] a seeming team that [is] meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done." Examples of granfalloons are "the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows -- and any nation, anytime, anywhere.
•   A kan-kan is the instrument which brings one into his or her karass.
•   A karass is a "team [of people] that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing". Humanity is organized into many such teams. One can try to discover "the limits of [one's] karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do ... but such investigations are bound to be incomplete."
•   Pool-pah is translated both as "shit storm" and "wrath of God".
•   To saroon is "to acquiese to the seeming demands of [one's] vin-dit."
•   A sin-wat is "a man who wants all of somebody's love. That's very bad."
•   sinookas are "the tendrils of [one's] life".
•   A stuppa is "a fogbound child".
•   A vin-dit is "a sudden, very personal shove in the direction of Bokononism".
•   A wampeter is "the pivot of a karass, around which the souls of the members of the karass revolve." A karass has two wampeters at any time, one waxing and one waning.
•   A wrang-wrang is "a person who steers people away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang's own life, to an absurdity.
•   Zah-mah-ki-bo is "fate -- inevitable destiny".

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Nice.

"Oubliette" is one of my most favorite words, ever.

[Triple Zero]

i should so read cat's cradle again. i think i was drunk halfway through reading it

and slaughterhouse five, never read that one. and probably other vonnegut's that are good?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

"Mother Night" and "Breakfast of Champions" are great.

Also, he wrote the awesomest autobiography ever. I don't remember what it was called.

[Chairman Risus]

I thought Cat's Cradle was really good and I really liked Slaughterhouse V.
Breakfast of Champions was alright, I guess. I liked Timequake better.

[LMNO]

His short story collections are also good. "Welcome to the Monkey House" in particular.

[Honey]

The first thing I read was the The Sirens of Titan while still in grammar school.  Then I went on to read most of his other stuff too.   Sirens of Titan features a religion called Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.  I like his short stories & essays also.  Here's the last pages of Palm Sunday:

"The most satisfying kindness which has been done me here was an invitation from St. Clement's Episcopal Church, whose congregation includes many actors, to preach on Palm Sunday in 1980. It is the custom of that church, which is also a theater, to have a stranger preach just once a year."

"I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea that good by & by - and then we will have two good ideas. What might that second good idea be? I don't know. How could I know?

I will make a wild guess that it will come from music somehow. I have often wondered what music is and why we love it so. It may be that music is that second good idea's being born.

I choose as my text the first eight verses of John twelve, which deal not with Palm Sunday but with the night before - with Palm Sunday Eve, with what we might call 'Spikenard Saturday.' I hope that will be close enough to Palm Sunday to leave you more or less satisfied. I asked an Episcopalian priest the other day what I should say to you about Palm Sunday itself. She told me to say that it was a brilliant satire on pomp and circumstances and high honors in this world.

So I tell you that.

The priest was Carol Anderson, who sold her physical church in order that her spiritual parish might survive. Her parish is All Angels - on West Eightieth, just off Broadway. She sold the church but hung on to the parish house. I assume that most, if not all, of the angels are still around.

Now, as to the verses about Palm Sunday Eve: I choose them because Jesus says something in the eighth verse which many people I have known have taken as proof that Jesus himself occasionally got sick & tired of people who needed mercy all the time. I read from the Revised Standard Bible rather than the King James, because it is easier for me to understand. Also, I will argue afterward that Jesus was only joking, & it is impossible to joke in King James English. The funniest joke in the world, if told in King James English, is doomed to sound like Charlton Heston.

I read:

Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; Martha served, but Lazarus was one of those at table with him.

Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard & anointed the feet of Jesus & wiped his feet with her hair; & the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment.

But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was to betray him), said, "Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii & given to the poor?" This he said, not that he cared for the poor but because he was a thief, & as he had the money box he used to take what was put into it.

Jesus said, "Let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial. The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me."

Thus ends the reading, & although I have promised a joke, there is not much of a chuckle in there anywhere. The reading, in fact, ends with at least two quite depressing implications: That Jesus could be a touch self-pitying, & that he was, with his mission to earth about to end, at least momentarily sick & tired of hearing about the poor.

The King James version of the last verse, by the way, is almost identical: "For the poor always ye have with you; but you do not always have me."

Whatever it was that Jesus really said to Judas was said in Aramaic, of course - & has come to us through Hebrew & Greek & Latin & archaic English. Maybe he only said something a lot like, 'The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.' Perhaps a little something has been lost in translation. & let us remember, too, that in translations jokes are commonly the first things to go.

I would like to recapture what has been lost. Why? Because I, as a Christ-worshiping agnostic, have seen so much un-Christion impatience with the poor encouraged by the quotation, 'For the poor always ye have with you.'

I am speaking mainly of my youth in Indianapolis, Indiana. No matter where I am & how old I become, I still speak of almost nothing but my youth in Indianapolis, Indiana. Whenever anybody out that way began to worry a lot about the poor people when I was young, some eminently respectable Hoosier, possibly an uncle or an aunt, would say that Jesus himself had given up on doing much about the poor. He or she would paraphrase John twelve, Verse eight" 'The poor people are hopeless. We'll always be stuck with them.'

The general company was then free to say that poor were hopeless because they were so lazy or dumb, that they drank too much & had too many children & kept coal in the bathtub, & so on.

Somebody was likely to quote Kin Hubbard, the Hoosier humorist, who said that he knew a man who was so poor that he owned twenty-two dogs. & so on.

If those Hoosiers were still alive, which they are not, I would tell them now that Jesus was only joking, & that he was not even thinking about the poor.

I would tell them, too, what I don't have to tell this particular congregation, that jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter & tears are both responses to frustration & exhaustion, to the futility of thinking & striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning to do afterward-& since I can start thinking & striving again that much sooner.

All right:

It is the evening before Palm Sunday. Jesus is frustrated & exhausted. He knows that one of his closest associates will soon betray him for money-& that he is going to be mocked & tortured & killed. He is going to feel all that a mortal feels when he dies in convulsions on the cross.

His visit among us is almost over-but life must go on for just a little while.

It is again suppertime.

How many suppertimes does Jesus have left? Five, I believe.

His male companions for this supper are themselves a mockery. One is Judas, who will betray him. The other is Lazarus, who has recently been dead for four days. Lazarus was so dead that he stunk, the Bible says. Lazarus is surely dazed, & not much of a conversationalist - & not necessarily grateful, either, to be alive again. It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

If I had read a little farther, we would have learned that there is a crowd outside, crazy to see Lazarus, not Jesus. Lazarus is the man of the hour as far as the crowd is concerned. 'Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.'

There are two sisters of Lazarus there - Martha & Mary. They, at least, are sympathetic & imaginatively helpful. Mary begins to massage & perfume the feet of Jesus Christ with an ointment made from the spikenard plant. Jesus had the bones of a man & is clothed in the flesh of a man - so it must feel awfully nice, what Mary is doing to his feet. Would it be heretical of us to suppose that Jesus closes his eyes?

This is too much for that envious hypocrite Judas, who says, trying to be more Catholic than the Pope: 'Hey - this is very un-Christian. Instead of wasting that stuff on your feet, we should have sold it & given the money to the poor people.'

To which Jesus replies in Aramaic: 'Judas, don't worry about it. There will still be plenty of poor people left long after I'm gone.'

This is about what Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln would have said under similar circumstances.

If Jesus did in fact say that, it is a divine black joke, well suited to the occasion. It says everything about hypocrisy and nothing about the poor. It is a Christian joke, which allows Jesus to remain civil to Judas, but to chide him about his hypocrisy all the same.

'Judas, don't worry about it. There will still be plenty of poor people left long after I'm gone.'

Shall I regarble it for you? 'The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.'

My own translation does no violence to the words in the Bible. I have changed their order some, not merely to make them into the joke the situation calls for, but to harmonize them, too, with the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount suggests a mercifulness that can never waver or fade.

This has no doubt been a silly sermon. I am sure you do not mind. People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

I thank you for your sweetly faked attention."

END"

-from Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut

[Honey]

This is from A Man Without A Country

Killing industrial quantities of defenseless human families, whether by old-fashioned apparatus or by newfangled contraptions from universities, in the expectation of gaining military or diplomatic advantage thereby, may not be such a hot idea after all.

Does it work?

Its enthusiasts, its fans, if I may call them that, assume that leaders of political entities we find inconvenient or worse are capable of pity for their own people.  If they see or at least hear about fricasseed women and children and old people who looked and talked like themselves, maybe even relatives, they will be incapacitated by weepiness.  So goes the theory, as I understand it.

Anyone who believes that might as well go all the way and make Santa Claus and the tooth fairy icons of our foreign policy.

-A Man Without A Country, Kurt Vonnegut

[Brotep]

I read Breakfast of Champions first, really liked it.  Then Slaughterhouse Five, which I thought was okay but raised a lot of questions and issues.  Funnily enough, I then read Cat's Crade, which answered them.


And this...Is  my favorite quote.  Other than the Tralfamadorian story from BoC.

A parable on the folly of pretending to discover, to understand [ 3 ]

I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be.

And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, "I'm sorry, but I never could read one of those things."

"Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God," I said, "and, when God finds a minute, I'm sure he'll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even you can understand."

She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed.

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he can see what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

[Honey]

Love the Tralfamadorians!      Now that is a metaphorical construct I can relate to!  (fascinated by the concept of time)  Kurt Vonnegut wrote a play called something like Between Time & Timbuktu (related to all the words in the dictionary relating to time).   

Hard to say which is my favorite quote      but I think it just might be

"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god."