“Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir.” he read, “You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next – and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized,” read Dwayne. “Why wouldn’t you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Today I wish that this was true, that the reason for these gaps in the human spirit was a lack of reason, left out of our programming by a Creator Who got distracted by how some star cluster spun in an interesting way and forgot to finish what It had started—or perhaps, this lack in us was a conscious choice from the first-and-only conscious Voice behind the keys of the universe computer, the One Who made these “liking machines” so timid amidst the “hating machines,” so screamingly loud, so screeching, the “killing machines” so deadly until the “crying machines” can’t leave their beds, until the “prayer machines” get tired of being on their knees and the “thinking machines” which are the real majority, so often quiet, have migraines from trying to take it all in and understand.
subsonic sonatas 