Beware, we're what we pretend to' be!
(Vithal C Nadkarni)
The president of the local dub 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 IQ s 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 openness 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 testy 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. Its round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies you've got about hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies, - 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.’
However, 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 every where 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.
