january 4, 2023
From a 2005 interview with one of my favorite writers of all time, Kurt Vonnegut:
Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:
Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?
And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is — we’re here on Earth to fart around.
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.
In a small town, there are only a handful of buildings that make it over maybe the three-story mark, and in a way, that makes them vastly more interesting in their surroundings than even the most beautifully modernist skyscraper, if you can see them as such. So painfully mundane and yet so striking; there's some sort of lesson here that Vonnegut clearly understood about viewing your daily world with a sense of awe and seeing the beauty that we take for granted.
If I can teach myself one thing in 2023, I hope it's that every trip to buy an envelope, every grain storage tower, every little mundane detail of the world around me looks beautiful to me, no matter how many times I see it.
they start with their seatbelts on btw