Ann’s riff on Kurt Vonnegut’s line that “only a nut case would want to be a human being” is terrific:

I sometimes like to think that we were given a choice whether to be born, that there was a beforelife (we like to think there’s an afterlife) in which the range of possibilities in a human life were fully explained and we could say yes or no, just like you can look at a rollercoaster and decide if you want to take the ride. So all of us here are the ones who decided to take the ride. I like to speculate about what percentage of beforelife dwellers decide to say yes. I imagine Vonnegut’s suggestion is correct: the percentage would be small. The downside risks are too horrible. But we’re the brave souls–we’re Vonnegut’s nuts–who once found the idea of being human so appealing.

Isn’t that a great mental image? In its own way, it’s very Vonnegut-ish.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 9:29 pm, 12 April 2007 and filed under Madison News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.