Rivers of Babylon

May 8, 2022September 12, 2002 by Kurt Vonnegut

My text is from the Gospel of Matthew:

“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”

There has so far been only one nation crazy enough to detonate atomic weapons in the midst of civilian populations, turning unarmed men, women and children into radioactive soot and bonemeal.

Let us pray in this holy space: “Dear God, please don’t ever let there be another nation like that.” Amen.

The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. This is because we are powerless. Peace has no representatives in Washington DC. Why not? Peace is not entertaining. Restraint is not entertaining.

What is entertaining? Take it from this old hack writer. Revenge, like sex, is terrifically entertaining. “Closure. Gimme Closure.” Grrrr.

George W. Bush, with his no-frills education, may believe that God or Moses, or some other sacred advisor, gave us this as a commandment: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

It was in fact the Babylonian king Hammurabi who said it first. And he wasn’t urging his own people to be more ferocious, more bloodthirsty. He was trying to make them less so. He was saying, in effect, that if you must seek revenge, you are entitled to this much of it, and not one bit more. Otherwise, you will create more people entitled to closure, until everybody in Babylonia is going to be seeking closure, and our once great country will go down the toilet of history.

Which it did.

And I thank you for your attention.

From September, 2002

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Expeditions to Kafka
Selected Essays
Stanley Corngold (Author)

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka’s work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther; Nietzsche’s conception of aphoristic form; bureaucratic organization; accident and risk; the logic of possession and inheritance; and myth, among others.Even as Corngold explores Kafka’s work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka’s ongoing relevance to the concerns of his day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.

Read an extract here.

Published	Aug 10 2023
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Extent	336
ISBN	9798765100448
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Reviews

With superb erudition and his inimitable flair, Stanley Corngold’s Expeditions offer a magisterial guide through the intricate and ambiguous terrain of Kafka’s texts. Insights abound, providing a comprehensive and consistently profound investigation that strikes the perfect balance between drawing interpretive conclusions and maintaining hermeneutic openness-a culminating accomplishment by Kafka’s most inspired and most inspiring reader.

John T. Hamilton, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

You are not being introduced to Kafka – you fall into his stories as you fall into a trap, the bait emerging in the interstices between his words and your mind. That said, Corngold’s Expeditions are by far the best introduction to Kafka I have seen. He invites you to join him on his ventures into Continent Kafka, and he inspires you to stray off from his expeditions on your own terms, and risk.

Benno Wagner, Professor in German Studies, Siegen University, Germany

Stanley Corngold has been reading, reflecting, and commenting on Kafka and his writings for more than half a century. He has become our most penetrating and luminous guide to Kafka’s labyrinthine world. These essays, the distillate of a lifetime, manage both to reveal and to preserve the mystery of Kafka’s genius.

Robert Norton, Professor of German, University of Notre Dame, USA