'We're Dancing Animals'

How Kurt Vonnegut going to buy an envelope fulfilled his purpose in life.

The author Kurt Vonnegut once told a journalist this story: One day, he wanted to go out to buy an envelope.

His wife protested. “Oh,” she said, “you’re not poor. Why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?”

“And so,” Vonnegut recalls, “I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great-looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs-up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, I don’t know. The moral of the story is — we’re here on Earth to fart around.”

He goes on to say that “computers will do us out of that,” and he says, “What the computer people don’t realize — or they don’t care — is we’re dancing animals. We love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”

Now I think there’s probably an argument to be made that computers can be used for all sorts of dancing, too, but I also think you get his point here: Don’t forget to do the things that, to you, feel like dancing.

(This comes from an October 2005 interview Vonnegut gave to PBS journalist David Brancaccio, according to the person who sent me a version of this. Googling, it I found part of the interview transcribed by someone here on their blog in 2010. The whole thing is good.)

(Also: Yes, I changed the name of my newsletter, so if you’re feeling crazy, that’s not you, that’s me. Thanks for reading!)