Busy, busy, busy
Kurt Vonnegut must have been the greatest optimist of all pessimists. His novel Cat’s Cradle ends with a jolly narrative of the destruction of life on Earth; armageddon with a grin.
The book probably does not translate well because Vonnegut seems to love wordplay.
In bokononism, a delightful religion made up by Vonnegut, one major ritual is boko-maru, wherein two people sit barefoot facing each other, “letting their soles meet.”
Cat’s Cradle tells of an ominous invention, a new crystal structure for ice having a melting point of 45.8 °C. Below that temperature, it swiftly crystallizes all water into ice upon contact, including the oceans and the water in the human body. This mischievous material is called ice-nine … which sounds like asinine. Vonnegut must have considered this word a good fit for man’s 20th-century pastime of finding practical, cost-effective ways to demolish the planet.