The Edge

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
— Kurt Vonnegut

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Travel Advisory

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it solely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
--Mark Twain

"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."
--Kurt Vonnegut in CAT'S CRADLE

Just finished RE-reading...

...CAT'S CRADLE by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I first read this book when I was in 7th or 8th grade and it had an impact on me. Now, re-reading it many years later, I find deeper meaning and bigger issues. This is natural, since I am now reading this piece with experienced eyes.

When I was younger, this book introduced me to the literary motif of entangled lives; the idea that there is a set list of people you are going to have in and out of your life. Some you might already know and some you don’t. People come and go and then connect with other people—this web-like view of life made sense to me and appealed to my budding bird’s-eye-view spiritual sense of the grand scheme of things. This motif is also expressed in Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant film MAGNOLIA, which features a cast of characters whose lives are spearate threads which eventually become woven together.

Now, I can see even clearer the parody and cynicism in CAT'S CRADLE but underneath that, there is still the sense of the grand scheme of things, a sense of profound reverence for the spirit. Since I first read CAT’S CRADLE, I have been exposed to a lot of different ideas, philosophies, beliefs and religions. Many years ago now, I came across something called The Michael Teaching. And parts of that belief system bear a resemblance to parts of Bokononism, the made up religion in CAT’S CRADLE. A karass in Bokononism is a group of people whose destinies are intertwined (bringing to mind a web or a Cat’s Cradle); in the Michael Teaching, such a group is called a cadence and is made up of 7 people (your cadence is then a member of a larger group of people, and so on, until you are part of a cadre, a group of 7,000 people, and you continue on, becoming an entity, etc. until you cycle out of this universe and join the Tao, The All-That-Is). In Bokononism, a duprass is a karass occupied by only two people; I will liken this to a monad in the Michael Teaching, a karmic relationship between people.

With its odd, touching, colorful characters and enormous implications, CAT’S CRADLE is dry, lucid, funny and horrifying. Despite its shortness, it packs in a stunning amount of ideas and gallops along quickly to a finale that is at once both sad and perfect.

Recommend? Yes.