A Celebration

""But if today is really in honor of a hundred children murdered in war," he said, "is today a day for a thrilling show?' 'The answer is yes, on one condition, that we, the celbrants, are working consciously and tirelessly to reduce the stupidity and viciousness of ourselves and of mankind.'" (Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle, 225) Ambassador Horlick Minton speaks these words less than an hour before San Lorenzo's icy downfall. When I read this paragraph I stopped, wrote 'fascinating' in the margins, and dog-eared it so I would remember to blog about it. The idea is an optimistic one: we can always celebrate as long as we are simultaneously making progress. Yet it is also a pessimistic one: we can never celebrate unless we are putting all of energy into benefiting society, into becoming better people than we were one second ago. That is tiring. We spoke in class about "dynamic tension", how in order to have one extreme we must have the other, and the question becomes whether anything in the middle really exists. One way to read this novel would be to say that Vonnegut constantly suggests that mankind is stupid and not capable of looking out for themselves. But another reading exists too. The people of San Lorenzo devote their entire lives to trying to be happy, trying to spin lies upon lies so that the fragile happiness does not break and instead becomes a tighter web. However, when are we allowed to stop and celebrate that which we already have? Is there ever a time we can throw up our hands and say, we have issues but we're trying, enough for today! Because if you are always happy would you even know you were happy? Would happiness even exist? The characters in Cat's Cradle tend to believe in extremes, but I believe that the balance between two ends is generally what we seek, and we must constantly take moments to stop, balance ourselves, and celebrate what we have already done, as well as what is to come.