To the happy few

“Anything new?” he began, to Milo’s son.
“Not as far as I know.”
“Are you telling me the truth?”
“To the best of my ability.”
“You’re not holding anything back?”
“Not as far as I can tell.”
“Would you tell me if you were?”
“I would tell you if I could.”

— Joseph Heller, in Closing Time

“I believe in the flood,” the Vice President replied.
“I don’t think I heard that.”
“I believe in the flood.”
“What flood?” Noodles was befuddled again.
“Noah’s flood, of course. The one in the Bible. So does my wife. Don’t you know about it?”
Through narrowed eyes Noodles searched the guileless countenance for some twinkle of play. “I’m not sure I know what you mean. You believe it was wet?”
“I believe that it’s true. In every detail.”
“That he took the male and the female of every animal species?”
“That’s what it says.”
“Sir,” said Noodles with civility. “We have by now catalogued more kinds of animal and insect life life than anyone could possibly collect in a lifetime and put onto a ship that size. How would he get them, where would he put them, to say nothing of room for himself and the families of his children, and the problems of storage of food and the removal of waste in those forty days and nights of rain?”

(…)

Noodles had jumped to his feet and was glancing around frantically, for a blackboard, for chalk and a pointer, for anything! “Water seeks its own level.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that.”
“Mount Everest is close to five miles high. For the earth to be covered in water, there would have to be water everywhere on the globe that was close to five miles deep.”
His future employer nodded, pleased that he finally seemed to be getting through. “There was that much water then.”
“Then the waters receded. Where could they recede to?”
“Into the oceans, of course.”
“Where were the oceans, if the world was under water?”
“Underneath the flood, of course,” was the unhesitating reply.

— Joseph Heller, in Closing Time

Contrapondo a modernidade do humor de Closing Time, estas ideias podiam ser tiradas de um artigo do Onion:

… a person who could chat with some fluency about something other than business to well-informed others who imagined egotistically that they were affecting world events by talking about them.

(…)

The problems were hopeless: there were too many people who needed food, and there was too much food to be able to feed them profitably.

But the day I knew I’d survive I felt very bad too, because then I knew I was going to die.

I’d always known I was going to die. But then I knew I was going to die. The night that sank in, I woke up in the morning with my eyes wet, and one of the night nurses noticed but didn’t say anything and I never told anyone but Claire. We were going home after my breakfast.

“Last night I shed a tear,” I admitted.
“You think I didn’t?”

— Joseph Heller, in Closing Time

Heller escreve com um desespero calmo e contido, mas redime-se ao atribuir esse desespero ao amor que os seus personagens sentem pela vida. “I decided I am going to live forever, or die trying”.

Closing Time é mais sombrio do que Catch-22, com reminiscências do 1984 e do Dr. Strangelove; curiosamente, o humor de Catch-22 parece-me mais moderno do que este, ou talvez seja o meu tempo que esteja invertido, o que não é de todo improvável.