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Thursday, 15 May 2003
If this isn't nice... ::
After writing about it last night, I forwarded the text of the Vonnegut lecture at the Mark Twain House to a few friends. I then remembered seeing a Vonnegut commencement speech on the wall of my friend/coworker B’s office (just a couple days ago), so I set out to find it on the web. No surprise: it’s here. The interesting twist is that Vonnegut did not write it ("It was quite witty, but not my wittiness.”); it’s one of the more spectacular Internet hoaxes.
I did find a commencement speech he gave at Rice University in 1998, in which, interestingly enough, he mentions Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, just as he did recently in Hartford. But this is a different kind of speech for a different kind of occasion:
I’ll pass on to you what another Methuselah said to me. He’s Joe Heller, author, as you know, of Catch 22. We were at a party thrown by a multi-billionaire out on Long Island, and I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch 22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed world-wide over the past forty years?”
Joe said to me, “I have something he can never have.”
I said, “What’s that, Joe?”
And he said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
...
One thing which Uncle Alex found objectionable about human beings was that they seldom took time out to notice when they were happy. He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and he would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
After forwarding the Vonnegut note, I mass-mailed most of my address book to tell them about my upcoming June 7 concert. I mentioned warm feelings associated with the piece we’ll be playing, and Mother Mallard, the group for which I’d learned it. I got a note back from one of my former MM bandmates—for whom I’d had to go digging to make sure I had the right email address. L shared similar feelings. If this isn’t nice, what is?
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