based on a true story
In college, like a decade ago, I read Cat’s Cradle in one night.1 I’m not a fast reader, so I stayed up way too late doing that.
A few months ago, a chemistry student asked me if there was any other form or shape that water could take. “Boy, do I have the book for you.”
Cat’s Cradle is about ice-nine, a form of water so stable it could freeze the entire world at room temperature, causing absolute ecological collapse; Vonnegut, the narrator and the reader reckoning with nuclear war.
Dr. Asa Breed—director of the lab where the nuclear bomb was born, at least in Vonnegut’s world—has this exchange with the narrator,
“There was one man hanged here in 1782 who had murdered twenty-six people. I’ve often thought somebody ought to do a book about him sometime. George Minor Moakley. He sang a song on the scaffold. He sang a song he’d composed for the occasion.”
“What was the song about?”
“You can find the words over at the Historical Society, if you’re really interested.”
“I just wondered about the general tone.”
“He wasn’t sorry about anything.”
“Some people are like that.”
“Think of it!” said Dr. Breed. “Twenty-six people he had on his conscience!”
“The mind reels,” I said.
While that student read Cat’s Cradle, I read it again too. I couldn’t resist. This time took a lot longer than one night; off and on, on, and more off until I finished it far, far after my student had.
“It was pretty good,” was his review.
In the final chapters of Cat’s Cradle, ice-nine does incidentally tumble into the sea, from the precipice of a would-be banana republic,2 San Lorenzo, ending the world; David getting the last word.
“Think of it!” said Dr. Breed. “Twenty-six people he had on his conscience!”
In addition to being a meditation on nuclear holocaust, it’s a heartbreaking critique of Christianity and colonialism and well worth your time, even fifty years later.
I really didn’t want to study for biochem
In Cat’s Cradle, Julian Castle establishes the nation’s only hospital, which bears the astonishing name, The House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle. In real life, Castle & Cooke, a Hawaiian ‘sugar and logistics company,’ would rename itself Dole Food Company in the 1920s and birth and nurture many banana republics.