Hocus Pocus
I wanted to collect some of my dog-earred pages:
Elias Tarkington, the severely wounded Abraham Lincoln look-alike, was brought home in 1 of his own wagons to Scipio, to his estate overlooking the town and lake.
He was not well educated, and was more a mechanic than a scientist, and so spent his last 3 years trying to invent what anyone familiar with Newton's Laws would have known was an impossibility, a perpetual-motion machine. He had no fewer than 27 contraptions built, which he foolishly expected to go on running, after he had given them an initial spin or whack, until Judgement Day.
I found 19 of those stubborn, mocking machines in the attic of what used to be their inventor's mansion, which in my time was the home of the College President, about a year after I came to work at Tarkington. I brought them back downstairs and into the 20th Century. Some of my students and I cleaned them up and restored any parts that had deteriorated during the intervening 100 years. At the least they were exquisite jewelry, with garnets and amethysts for bearings, with arms and legs of exotic woods, with tumbling ball of ivory, with chutes and counterweights of silver. It was as though dying Elias hoped to overwhelm science with the magic of previous metals.
The longest my students and I could get the best of them to run was 51 seconds. Some eternity!
-
To me, and I passed this on to my students, the restored devices demonstrated not only how quickly anything on Earth runs down without steady infusions of energy. They reminded us, too, of the craftsmanship no longer practiced in the town below. Nobody down there in our time could make things that cunning and beautiful.
Yes, and we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays:
"THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE"
--
I have just looked up Harvard University. It was 13,000,000 bound volumes now. What a read!
And almost every book written for or about the ruling class.
--
Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this:
WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT,
BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP.
--
I repeated an old story Grandfather Wills had taught me, which was about a town where a cannon was fired at noon every day. One day the cannoneer was sick at the last minute and was too incapacitated to fire the cannon.
So at high noon there was silence.
All the people in the town jumped out of their skins when the sun reached its zenith. They asked each other in astonishment, "Good gravy! What was that?"
My lawyer wanted to know what that had to do with my not swearing.
I replied that in an era as foulmouthed as this one, "Good gravy" had the same power to startle as a cannon shot.
--
[summary of the "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore" in Black Garterbelt about space travel and the meaning of life]
--Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
Elias Tarkington, the severely wounded Abraham Lincoln look-alike, was brought home in 1 of his own wagons to Scipio, to his estate overlooking the town and lake.
He was not well educated, and was more a mechanic than a scientist, and so spent his last 3 years trying to invent what anyone familiar with Newton's Laws would have known was an impossibility, a perpetual-motion machine. He had no fewer than 27 contraptions built, which he foolishly expected to go on running, after he had given them an initial spin or whack, until Judgement Day.
I found 19 of those stubborn, mocking machines in the attic of what used to be their inventor's mansion, which in my time was the home of the College President, about a year after I came to work at Tarkington. I brought them back downstairs and into the 20th Century. Some of my students and I cleaned them up and restored any parts that had deteriorated during the intervening 100 years. At the least they were exquisite jewelry, with garnets and amethysts for bearings, with arms and legs of exotic woods, with tumbling ball of ivory, with chutes and counterweights of silver. It was as though dying Elias hoped to overwhelm science with the magic of previous metals.
The longest my students and I could get the best of them to run was 51 seconds. Some eternity!
-
To me, and I passed this on to my students, the restored devices demonstrated not only how quickly anything on Earth runs down without steady infusions of energy. They reminded us, too, of the craftsmanship no longer practiced in the town below. Nobody down there in our time could make things that cunning and beautiful.
Yes, and we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays:
"THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE"
--
I have just looked up Harvard University. It was 13,000,000 bound volumes now. What a read!
And almost every book written for or about the ruling class.
--
Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this:
WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT,
BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP.
--
I repeated an old story Grandfather Wills had taught me, which was about a town where a cannon was fired at noon every day. One day the cannoneer was sick at the last minute and was too incapacitated to fire the cannon.
So at high noon there was silence.
All the people in the town jumped out of their skins when the sun reached its zenith. They asked each other in astonishment, "Good gravy! What was that?"
My lawyer wanted to know what that had to do with my not swearing.
I replied that in an era as foulmouthed as this one, "Good gravy" had the same power to startle as a cannon shot.
--
[summary of the "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore" in Black Garterbelt about space travel and the meaning of life]
--Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus