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I started reading Hocus Pocus as we were flying home for the holidays. I like to read Vonnegut on planes because his writing leaves me with a compassionate, if exasperated, outlook towards the walls of humanity surrounding me. I finished it just this afternoon, as I was sitting on my kitchen counter. Why the counter? The sheer pleasure I get from acting abnormally around my neighbors notwithstanding, there's a huge set of windows over the counter that look onto the vineyard in our back yard, and it really is the best seat in the house in the late afternoon, as the sun is setting over the mountains in its obscene technicolor glory. It's been like an early summer out here for the past few days, too. So: stunning view, balmy weather, satirical humanism--a truly winning combination.

I like Vonnegut's narrator's description of the Freethinkers, a group I'm sure Vonnegut associated himself with philosophically:

I have looked up who the Freethinkers were. They were members of a short-lived sect, mostly of German descent, who believed, as did my Grandfather Willis, that nothing but sleep awaited good and evil persons alike in the Afterlife, that science had proved all organized religions to be baloney, that God was unknowable, and that the greatest use a person could make of his or her lifetime was to improve the quality of life for all in his or her community. (185)

Since Vonnegut's narrator is former "war hero," such optimism is frequently countered throughout the novel by morbid images of some of the worst atrocities in human history--say, concentration camps and atom bombs, to name a few. Vonnegut's narrator constantly daydreams about the infinite possibilities of what the world could be like, and of the ultimate purpose of human existence, and concludes, "Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe" (324).