kurt vonnegut on reproducing

I recalled a thing I had read about the aboriginal Tasmanians, habitually naked persons who, when encountered by white men in the seventeenth century, were strangers to agriculture, animal husbandry, architecture of any sort, and possibly even fire. They were so contemptible in the eyes of white men, by reason of their ignorance, that they were hunted for sport by the first settlers, who were convicts from England. And the aborigines found life so unattractive that they gave up reproducing.

I suggested to Newt now that it was a similar hopelessness that had unmanned us.

Newt made a shrewd observation. “I guess all the excitement in bed had more to do with excitement about keeping the human race going than anybody ever imagined.”

# Kurt Vonnegut
# 1963
# Cat’s Cradle