We don't know enough about life

Thinking about Vonnegut, Hamlet, and the absurdity of humanity after watching Katy Perry go to space with Jeff Bezos' girlfriend and Oprah's bff

There’s this video on the internet (lol that’s where all the videos are, that’s where they live now) of Kurt Vonnegut giving a talk about story structure. It is great and I recommend you watch it – the full version, not the little five-minute clips that social media tries to show you.

In the full version, he eventually goes from mapping out the plots to Cinderella and The Metamorphosis to talking about Hamlet. You know Hamlet. Of course you do.

(The big homie Kurt Vonnegut)

These other stories, Vonnegut points out, hit us with wild swings between good news and bad news. Cinderella’s mother dies and she’s tormented by a wicked stepmother and stepsisters. (Bad news!) A fairy godmother uses magic to dress her up for the prince’s ball. (Good news!) The clock strikes twelve and she has to peace up out of there in a hurry. (Bad news!) And so forth.

But Hamlet, the play featuring the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, among many other dope lines (“What do you read, my lord?” “Words, words, words.”), presents a story in which it’s genuinely hard to tell what’s good news and what’s bad news. Stuff is just happening. Misery and murder and humans trying but mostly failing to make any sense of it all. This, Vonnegut argues, is what resonates with us about it even 400 years later.

“We are so seldom told the truth,” Vonnegut says. “And in Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us: We don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and the bad news is.”

You can’t get us to believe this, of course. As human beings, we take ourselves pretty goddamn seriously. We are the smartest animal that we know of, according to criteria that we came up with, and so we expect that we can know absolutely everything if we just stay after it long enough. Some of us are pretty sure that they already do know everything. Some are even sure that all the knowledge worth knowing comes from some very old book (theirs, not yours, and they may or may not have read it in its entirety), and they’re more than willing to bonk you over the head if you disagree.

We are, in other words, pretty ridiculous. All the proof you need of that is the fact that we just sent Katy fucking Perry to space. Katy Perry! One of the more vapid and less accomplished pop stars of the last couple decades! Granted, she wasn’t the only one. There was also Jeff Bezos’ girlfriend and Oprah’s bff, plus some actual scientists who no one seems to care about.

There are a lot of absurd things about using our obscene resources on an 11-minute trip that is the cosmic equivalent of journeying to your own front yard. I think my favorite is this line from the ABC News story, which describes Oprah’s pal Gayle King getting out of the spaceship after returning to Earth:

“King, who has said she's afraid of flying, kissed the ground as she climbed out of the capsule, thanking Jesus and then Bezos.”

I mean, don’t that just say it all? But I guess if you’re Bezos it’s far preferable to what William Shatner wrote after his own trip on one of those space shuttles in 2021:

“It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”

According to Shatner, there is a name for this feeling of sadness upon seeing Earth from afar – the “Overview Effect.” It was coined by Frank White, who wrote that seeing our planet at this remove makes one realize: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors.”

That seems worth thinking about for a second right now, at this particular moment, doesn’t it? You look at pictures of politicians proudly posing in front of other human beings in cages. You see the daily squabbling over who deserves to eat food or have medicine and whether any of it should be paid for by the people who have so much money they can send a third-rate pop singer into orbit. You realize that almost everything about the way we live is made up, so we could simply decide to make it some other way. Then you wonder how we can possibly think we know everything when we keep choosing to live this way instead.

It’s always wild to me when the plot of a movie or sci-fi novel involves a beleaguered version of humanity searching for a new home elsewhere in the universe. Something like Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” for example. Earth has become uninhabitable, or will very soon. And we have to make sure human life goes on, if only for the future generations.

We never seem to ask why that needs to happen, though. So many other species have come and gone. Dinosaurs had a good long run, but are the cosmos really so much poorer for having lost them? What do we think is so special about people that the universe simply must continue to have us somewhere in it? Especially when, in all likelihood, the thing that will make Earth uninhabitable will be us. You know what they call something that gradually destroys its host organism and then goes looking for a new one? Because it typically ain’t anything nice.

You ask yourself what about humanity would be worth saving, and the things that spring to mind are not our talent for maximizing shareholder value or creating increasingly ingenious ways of destroying each other or even building websites that start out selling books and eventually earn us Fuck Off To Space money. It’s other stuff. Art and love and various expressions/appreciations of beauty. Shit that we don’t really seem to value all that much in the present moment.

Like another absurd news item from this week, when RFK Jr. lamented whatever combination of food dyes and life-saving vaccines he thinks are causing autism. This is bad, he said, because these poor autistic kids will never pay taxes (lol that that’s the actual first thing he thought of) or play baseball (lol guess you never watched an MLB player self-soothe just outside the batter’s box between every single pitch, bro) or write a poem (lol guess you never stopped to wonder what might have been going on with Emily Dickinson, bro).

First of all I want to ask, how many billionaires already fit many of his definitions? (They ain’t paying much in taxes or playing a lot of baseball, and they sure as shit aren’t writing poems.) But second, why is any of it important to him? Would he actually care if we accidentally created a world where, 50 years from now, there were no more poets or baseball players? Because there’s very little indication now that he or any of his friends care very much about any human expressions of joy or beauty unless they can somehow turn into money that they can personally spend.

I wonder sometimes how we would live differently if we could get ourselves to believe – I mean really believe – that we are temporary meatsacks with a rare (as far as we know) ability to wonder and ask why but not quite so much ability to answer our own questions. If we could accept that our brief lives are all some kind of accident and none of it necessarily means anything, would we enjoy it more? Would we be better to each other? Would we be somehow worse?

I think about the poet (whose name I forget now) who wrote about “my apparently inexhaustible notion that I am moving toward a destination.” If we could just let that go and admit our own ignorance, while still maintaining the sense of wonder that makes us want to know more, would we be better off?

I also think of the poet whose name I can remember, because it is Marie Howe and she is rad, who wrote about these conversations she’d have with her brother before he died, his own life even briefer than most:

“This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.”