Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.
“Huh?” said George.
“That dance – it was nice,” said Hazel.
“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good – no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.
“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.
“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel, a little envious. “All the things they think up.”
“Um,” said George.
“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday – just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.”
“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.
“Well – maybe make ‘em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”
“Good as anybody else,” said George.
“Who knows better’n I do what normal is?” said Hazel.
“Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.
“All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me for a while.”
George weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice it any more. It’s just a part of me.
“You been so tired lately – kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few.”
“Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”
“If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean – you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just set around.”
“If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”
“I’d hate it,” said Hazel.
“There you are,” said George. “The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?”
If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
“Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.
“What would?” said George blankly.
“Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said?”
“Who knows?” said George.
The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and gentlemen – ”
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.
“That’s all right –” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.”
“Ladies and gentlemen” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me – ” she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under–handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”
A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen – upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever worn heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H–G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H–G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle–tooth random.
“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not – I repeat, do not – try to reason with him.”
There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have – for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. “My God –” said George, “that must be Harrison!”
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
“Even as I stand here –” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened – I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison’s scrap–iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber–ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.
“I shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people. “Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!”
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all, he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
“Now” said Harrison, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” he commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.”
The music began. It was normal at first – cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while – listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girl’s tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.
They kissed it.
And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George.
But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying?” he said to Hazel.
“Yup,” she said,
“What about?” he said.
“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”
“What was it?” he said.
“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.
“Forget sad things,” said George.
“I always do,” said Hazel.
“That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun in his head.
“Gee – I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.
“You can say that again,” said George.
“Gee –” said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.”

Edgar Allan Poe Anniversary

This is an article that appeared in the January 13, 2009 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer

Poe's heart belong elsewhere? Nevermore!
Three cities who claim the writer will scrap tonight at the Free Library. But the Philadelphian who started this fight has no doubts.

By Tirdad Derakhshani

Inquirer Staff Writer
There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.

- Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston - exactly 200 years ago, come Monday. His bones languish in a Baltimore grave.

But his (telltale) heart - inflamed as it was with love and hatred for the Quaker City - belongs to us.

So says Philly writer and Poe enthusiast Edward Pettit, who sparked the "Poe War" two years ago with an essay in the City Paper that challenged "the perceived wisdom that Poe is a Baltimore writer." Poe aficionados in Baltimore and Boston struck back with newspaper editorials and blog posts.

After more than two years of sniping, Poe experts from the three cities will face off in "The Great Poe Debate" at 7:30 tonight at the Free Library, 19th and Vine Streets. It will coincide with the library's exhibition of Poe artifacts, "Quoth the Raven: A 200-Year Remembrance of the Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe," on view through Feb. 13.

Pettit will argue his case to Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in Baltimore since 1979, and Poe scholar Paul Lewis from Boston College. WMGK (102.9-FM) radio personality and actor Grover Silcox, known locally for his one-man show, Edgar Allan Poe and the Flip Side of Comedy, will moderate.

The debate is one of dozens of events, lectures and readings commemorating Poe's bicentennial not only in Philly, Boston and Baltimore, but also in New York and Richmond, Va., two other cities where Poe spent time during his peripatetic existence.

Pettit, 41, born and bred in the city's Olney/East Oak Lane section, argues that Poe's real spiritual home is Philly, where he lived from 1838 to 1844, because that is where the poet, critic and short story writer composed his best stories, including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "William Wilson," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Masque of the Red Death."

It was in Philly, Pettit writes in an essay, that "Poe invented the mystery/detective story, which has burgeoned into the largest of literary genres. Poe is also the forefather of both the horror and science fiction genres."

Pettit, who teaches writing at La Salle University and regularly writes about Poe in his "Ed & Edgar" blog, said that "not only did [Poe] write almost all of his greatest stories here, but the city itself had a great influence on his writing."

Ironically, Philly may have had that influence because it was one of the most violent and chaotic cities in the country. "It was a Philadelphia of race and labor riots, poverty and crime. A stinking effluvia of corruption and decadence rolled down its streets, dimming the lights," Pettit writes. Philly "was the crucible for Poe's imagination," which was usually fixated on the dark side of human existence.

Pettit insists that the two years Poe spent in Baltimore in the mid-1830s produced nothing of any literary worth.

Baltimore's claims on Poe, Pettit said, are based principally on his death there in 1849. Yet Poe, who died of an unknown cause shortly after he was found delirious, wandering the streets, wasn't even living in Baltimore at the time. He was passing through on his way from Richmond to New York.

"Baltimore's real claim is that [it] murdered Poe," said Pettit. "Poe died of Baltimore - it was one visit too many."

Baltimore's Jerome admits he's a little tickled by Pettit's pointed diss.

"Ed is a terrific guy," he said, "misguided perhaps, but very articulate and a formidable opponent." That said, he dismissed Pettit as a fantasist. "Suddenly it's the Poe bicentennial and everyone is coming out of the woodwork, saying 'Poe belongs to us.' "

He said Poe, whose father's family hailed from Baltimore, would never have gone on to write his most famous tales were it not for a literary prize he won in Baltimore for the early story "MS. Found in a Bottle." It was in Baltimore, he added, where Poe fell in love with his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia, whom he married in 1836.

Jerome explained that Baltimore won out in all things Poe because the city aggressively marketed its Poe connection shortly after the writer's death.

"Philly didn't do anything" to honor Poe's death, he said.

Jerome and Pettit do agree on one thing: Bostonian Paul Lewis' claims that Poe belongs to Boston are silly.

Speaking on the phone from his office at Boston College, Lewis, 59, said that although Poe spent only six months in Boston as an adult, his entire worldview as an artist was forged in opposition to Boston's literary establishment, especially Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the transcendentalist poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who taught that a poem's moral message is far more important than its form. Poe made art for art's sake, not for the sake of moral education.

When told about Lewis' argument on behalf of Beantown, Jerome simply said, "Well, excuse me while I nod off. So what?"

The University of Pennsylvania's Thomas Devaney, whose essay "Edgar Allan Poe at 200: The Absolute Literary Case" accompanies the library's Poe exhibition, said the debate is significant because it has brought so much attention to Poe's works.

"The debate over the poet's bones are about his legacy - that's what Pettit is talking about . . . his body of work," Devaney said.

He said it's hard to overestimate Poe's influence on American - and European - culture. Poems such as "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven," he said, are "in the DNA of our culture."

Devaney will host an evening of readings devoted to "The Raven" at the Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus on Thursday. He said Poe is everywhere in today's culture: Tim Burton's film Vincent; the series of Poe films made by Vincent Price; the songs of Lou Reed and Patti Smith; even Matt Groening's The Simpsons. (The animated show's riff on "The Raven" will be screened during the Writers House event.)

Poet and retired Penn English professor Daniel Hoffman, 85, whose 1971 book Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, is considered one of the most significant modern studies of Poe's writing, traces Poe's enduring popularity to his ability as a psychologist.

"He shows with great honesty the impulses and desires that most people have but hide. Poe explores our unconscious and brings it to light," said Hoffman, who will participate in Thursday's reading at the Writers House and also will talk about Poe's influence on three contemporary women writers at Philly's own Poe house, at Seventh and Spring Garden Streets, on Saturday at 2 p.m. The house, which is perhaps not as well known as Baltimore's Poe house, was one of Poe's domiciles in Philly. In 1978, Congress declared it a national historic site.

Those Winter Sundays

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden (page 779 in your textbook)








Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferent to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Comment on what this poem means to you.

The winter evening settles down

T. S. Eliot

The winter evening settles down









The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

p. 503

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Robert Frost

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening









Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

P 775

Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

Robert Bly

Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter








It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.

p. 513