Vonnegut Transcriptions

The pictures of these pages are now up on the blog, and they're available in the reading room, but here are my transcriptions!

The smudged poem on the back of a page of notes:

Her molten breast holds no solid thing

Graven in(?) which the name Plato or Brahms

                                                Or Lincoln –

Might survive –

Undefeatable(?) happiness(?)

A talisman(?) ??? show that on this tiny planet

Amid great Suns and Nebulae

There was a strange condition(?) of matter

An ???????? chemical cowardice(?)

Possible … For an instant in infinite time –

Here was life.

The paragraph on the back of a test:

            Amy Sheissewetter wouldn’t say have said shit if she had a mouth full; Gus, her spouse, was a rabid anti-semite, who couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a banjo; and Rex Sheissewetter, when he wasn’t trying to light farts in the men’s rooms boy’s lavatory of P.S. 43, divided his time about equally between building model airplanes and masturbating.  The Sheissewetter’s could afford to be indifferent about atomic warfare

And the poem on its own piece of paper in the middle of that test:

Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Matter is energy.

Energy is matter.

There we begin our dismal story,

When Man lay aside his crucifix

            for the new Holy Trinity:

Matter,

Energy,

and Time;

When mass suicide was made possible –

The Grand Ideal, Oblivion,

To be shared by all,

No longer to be inhibited

By the faint of heart

Nor by the minority will to live.

Man, thou art but dust:

To dust return.

And wonder not what followed

For no living thing remains on Earth;

Not a bird bursts its breast with melody.

Nor are there forests, nor shy forest creatures