Foreword in Bartlett's Words to Live By

Vonnegut wrote a Foreword in Bartlett's Words to Live By: Advice and Inspiration for Everyday Life, released in 2006.

Summary

John Bartlett

Among the great American inventors—which includes the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, and the African-American communities that developed blues music—is surely John Bartlett, who created and published the first collection of short quotations from well-known people. This book contains not just intellectual weight, but physical as well in the readers' hands, requiring our sensitive fingers to turn its pages. Books flirt with our body in ways that computers do not, and they work anywhere above water that has light and without even the FBI's ability to invade your privacy. Primitive as books are, made of natural materials, they remain a major success as a means of storing and retrieving information. Perhaps to give books a high-tech name for the 21st century, we should start referring to them as OMAs: "Open Me Anywhere".

This particular OMA is a kind of search engine of 1,400 soundbites from the past, taken from the 25,000 available in the four pound OMA, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Vonnegut's own favorite, The Serenity Prayer, was spoken by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1943 at a sermon on Cape Cod. When Vonnegut included it in one of his novels that was then later published in the Soviet Union, people there who'd never heard it before copied it to put on their walls. This OMA can be a source of advice and inspiration, perhaps better even than parents. The only advice Vonnegut ever got from his father was to take his hands out of his pockets and stand up straight.