CAT’S CRADLE
contents:
1. The Day the World Ended
2. Nice, Nice, Very Nice
3. Folly
4. A Tentative Tangling of Tendrils
5. Letter from a Pie-med
6. Bug Fights
7. The Illustrious Hoenikkers
8. Newt’s Thing with Zinka
9. Vice-president in Charge of Volcanoes
10. Secret Agent X-9
11. Protein
12. End of the World Delight
13. The Jumping-off Place
14. When Automobiles Had Cut-glass Vases
15. Merry Christmas
16. Back to Kindergarten
17. The Girl Pool
18. The Most Valuable Commodity on Earth
19. No More Mud
20. Ice-nine
21. The Marines March On
22. Member of the Yellow Press
23. The Last Batch of Brownies
24. What a Wampeter Is
25. The Main Thing About Dr. Hoenikker
26. What God Is
27. Men from Mars
28. Mayonnaise
29. Gone, but Not Forgotten
30. Only Sleeping
31. Another Breed
32. Dynamite Money
33. An Ungrateful Man
34. Vin-dit
35. Hobby Shop
36. Meow
37. A Modem Major General
38. Barracuda Capital of the World
39. Fata Morgana
40. House of Hope and Mercy
41. A Karass Built for Two
42. Bicycles for Afghanistan
43. The Demonstrator
44. Communist Sympathizers
45. Why Americans Are Hated
46. The Bokononist Method for Handling Caesar
47. Dynamic Tension
48. Just Like Saint Augustine
49. A Fish Pitched Up by an Angry Sea
50. A Nice Midget
51. O.K., Mom
52. No Pain
53. The President of Fabri-Tek
54. Communists, Nazis, Royalists,
Parachutists, and Draft Dodgers
55. Never Index Your Own Book
56. A Self-supporting Squirrel Cage
57. The Queasy Dream
58. Tyranny with a Difference
59. Fasten Your Seat Belts
60. An Underprivileged Nation
61. What a Corporal Was Worth
62. Why Hazel Wasn’t Scared
63. Reverent and Free
64. Peace and Plenty
65. A Good Time to Come to San Lorenzo
66. The Strongest Thing There Is
67. Hy-u-o-ook-kuh!
68. Hoon-yera Mora-toorz
69. A Big Mosaic
70. Tutored by Bokonon
71. The Happiness of Being an American
72. The Pissant Hilton
73. Black Death
74. Cat’s Cradle
75. Give My Regards to Albert Schweitzer
76. Julian Castle Agrees with Newt
that Everything Is Meaningless
77. Aspirin and Boko-maru
78. Ring of Steel
79. Why McCabe’s Soul Grew Coarse
80. The Waterfall Strainers
81. A White Bride for the Son of a Pullman Porter
82. Zah-mah-ki-bo
83. Dr. Schlichter von Koenigswald Approaches
the Break-even Point
84. Blackout
85. A Pack of Foma
86. Two Little Jugs
87. The Cut of My Jib
88. Why Frank Couldn’t Be President
89. Duffle
90. Only One Catch
91. Mona
92. On the Poet’s Celebration of his First Boko-maru
93. How I Almost Lost My Mona
94. The Highest Mountain
95. I See the Hook
96. Bell, Book, and Chicken in a Hatbox
97. The Stinking Christian
98. Last Rites
99. Dyot meet mat
100. Down the Oubliette Goes Frank
101. Like My Predecessors, I Outlaw Bokonon
102. Enemies of Freedom
103. A Medical Opinion on the Effects of a Writers’ Strike
104. Sulfathiazole
105. Pain-killer
106. What Bokononists Say When They Commit Suicide
107. Feast Your Eyes!
108. Frank Tells Us What to Do
109. Frank Defends Himself
110. The Fourteenth Book
111. Time Out
112. Newt’s Mother’s Reticule
113. History
114. When I Felt the Bullet Enter My Heart
115. As It Happened
116. The Grand Ah-whoom
117. Sanctuary
118. The Iron Maiden and the Oubliette
119. Mona Thanks Me
120. To Whom It May Concern
121. I Am Slow to Answer
122. The Swiss Family Robinson
123. Of Mice and Men
124. Frank’s Ant Farm
125. The Tasmanians
126. Soft Pipes, Play On
127. The End
cat’s cradle
The Day the World Ended 1
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Jonah—John—if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still—not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.
Listen:
When I was a younger man—two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago.
When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called The Day the World Ended.
The book was to be factual.
The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then.
I am a Bokononist now.
I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon. But Bokononism was unknown beyond the gravel beaches and coral knives that ring this little island in the Caribbean Sea, the Republic of San Lorenzo.
We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended.
Nice, Nice, Very Nice 2
“If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons,” writes Bokonon, “that person may be a member of your karass.”
At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, “Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.” By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.
It is as free-form as an amoeba.
In his “Fifty-third Calypso,” Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:
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.
Folly 3
Nowhere does Bokonon warn against a person’s trying to discover the limits of his karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do. Bokonon simply observes that such investigations are bound to be incomplete.
In the autobiographical section of The Books of Bokanon he writes a parable on the folly of pretending to discover, to understand:
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 sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].
A Tentative Tangling of Tendrils 4
Be that as it may, I intend in this book to include as many members of my karass as possible, and I mean to examine all strong hints as to what on Earth we, collectively, have been up to.
I do not intend that this book be a tract on behalf of Bokononism. I should like to offer a Bokononist warning about it, however. The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this:
“All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”
My Bokononist warning is this:
Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
So be it.
About my karass, then.
It surely includes the three children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the so-called “Fathers” of the first atomic bomb. Dr. Hoenikker himself was no doubt a member of my karass, though he was dead before my sinookas, the tendrils of my life, began to tangle with those of his children.
The first of his heirs to be touched by my sinookas was Newton Hoenikker, the youngest of his three children, the younger of his two sons. I learned from the publication of my fraternity, The Delta Upsilon Quarterly, that Newton Hoenikker, son of the Nobel Prize physicist, Felix Hoenikker, had been pledged by my chapter, the Cornell Chapter.
So I wrote this letter to Newt: