K U R T V O N N E G U T
SEVEN STORIES PRESS
York • London
©
by Kurt Vonnegut
A Seven Stories First Edition
Seven Stories Press
Watts Street
New York, NY
Distributed in Canada by
Toronto.
Distributed in the
by
London.
All rights reserved.
Special thanks to Marty
ofWNYC, who served as city
desk editor to our roving reporter on the Afterlife, encouraging him to keep digging away at the story, and getting public radio to pay him a buck a word, which isn't bad for an out-of-the-way beat like Heaven.
Portions of the introduction to this book were adapted from a graduation address delivered by the author at Agnes Scott College, Atlanta, Georgia, on May
1999.
ISBN:
Printed in the
INTRODUCTION .
GOD BLESSYOU, DR KEVORKIAN 21
INDEX OF PERSONS 79
AWORD FROMWNYC'S REPORTER
THE AFTERLIFE
My first near-death experience was an accident, a botched anesthesia during a triple bypass. I had listened to several people on TV talk shows who had gone down the blue tunnel to the Pearly Gates, and even beyond the Pearly Gates, or so they said, and then come back to life
But I certainly wouldn't have
set out on such a risky expedition on purpose, without first having survived one, and then planned another in cooperation with Dr. Jack Kevorkian and the staff at the state-of-the-art lethal injection execution facility at
Texas.
The following reports were recorded for later broadcast by radio station WNYC. I hope they convey
a sense of immediacy. They were taped in the tiled Huntsville death chamber only five minutes or so after I was unstrapped from the gurney. The tape recorder, incidentally, like the gurney, was the property of the good people of Texas, and was ordinarily used to immortalize the last words of persons about to make a one-way, all-expenses-paid trip to Paradise. There will be no more round trips for me, barring another accident. For the sake of my family, I am trying to reinstate my health and life insurance polices, if possible. But other journalists, and perhaps even tourists, will surely follow the safe two-way path to Eternity I pioneered. I beg them to be content, as I learned to be, with interviews they are able to conduct on the hundred yards or so of vacant lot between the far end of the blue tunnel and the Pearly Gates. To go through the Pearly
no matter how
tempting the interviewee on the other side, as I myself discovered the hard way, is to run the risk that crotch-
ety Saint Peter, depending on his
may never let
you out again. Think of how heartbroken your friends and relatives would be if, by going through the Pearly Gates to talk to Napoleon, say, you in effect committed About belief or lack of belief in an Some of
you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort.
I am a
which means, in part, that I have
tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. My GermanAmerican ancestors, the earliest of whom settled in our Middle West about the time of our Civil War, called themselves "Freethinkers," which is the same sort of thing. My great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut
wrote, for example, "If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?" I myself have written, "If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake."
I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.
I made that joke, of course, before my first neardeath accidental
SEVEN STORIES PRESS
York • London
©
by Kurt Vonnegut
A Seven Stories First Edition
Seven Stories Press
Watts Street
New York, NY
Distributed in Canada by
Toronto.
Distributed in the
by
London.
All rights reserved.
Special thanks to Marty
ofWNYC, who served as city
desk editor to our roving reporter on the Afterlife, encouraging him to keep digging away at the story, and getting public radio to pay him a buck a word, which isn't bad for an out-of-the-way beat like Heaven.
Portions of the introduction to this book were adapted from a graduation address delivered by the author at Agnes Scott College, Atlanta, Georgia, on May
1999.
ISBN:
Printed in the
INTRODUCTION .
GOD BLESSYOU, DR KEVORKIAN 21
INDEX OF PERSONS 79
AWORD FROMWNYC'S REPORTER
THE AFTERLIFE
My first near-death experience was an accident, a botched anesthesia during a triple bypass. I had listened to several people on TV talk shows who had gone down the blue tunnel to the Pearly Gates, and even beyond the Pearly Gates, or so they said, and then come back to life
But I certainly wouldn't have
set out on such a risky expedition on purpose, without first having survived one, and then planned another in cooperation with Dr. Jack Kevorkian and the staff at the state-of-the-art lethal injection execution facility at
Texas.
The following reports were recorded for later broadcast by radio station WNYC. I hope they convey
a sense of immediacy. They were taped in the tiled Huntsville death chamber only five minutes or so after I was unstrapped from the gurney. The tape recorder, incidentally, like the gurney, was the property of the good people of Texas, and was ordinarily used to immortalize the last words of persons about to make a one-way, all-expenses-paid trip to Paradise. There will be no more round trips for me, barring another accident. For the sake of my family, I am trying to reinstate my health and life insurance polices, if possible. But other journalists, and perhaps even tourists, will surely follow the safe two-way path to Eternity I pioneered. I beg them to be content, as I learned to be, with interviews they are able to conduct on the hundred yards or so of vacant lot between the far end of the blue tunnel and the Pearly Gates. To go through the Pearly
no matter how
tempting the interviewee on the other side, as I myself discovered the hard way, is to run the risk that crotch-
ety Saint Peter, depending on his
may never let
you out again. Think of how heartbroken your friends and relatives would be if, by going through the Pearly Gates to talk to Napoleon, say, you in effect committed About belief or lack of belief in an Some of
you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort.
I am a
which means, in part, that I have
tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. My GermanAmerican ancestors, the earliest of whom settled in our Middle West about the time of our Civil War, called themselves "Freethinkers," which is the same sort of thing. My great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut
wrote, for example, "If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?" I myself have written, "If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake."
I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.
I made that joke, of course, before my first neardeath accidental
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