Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

There's nothing I can add or take from these quotes from Vonnegut's Galapagos, other than to say that Kazakh and James Wait are two characters, the first a dog and the latter a man, who have just met an untimely end:

I say now of Kazakh's untimely death, lest anyone should be moved to tears, "Oh, well -- she wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

I say the same thing about the death of James Wait: "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

This wry comment on how little most of us were likely to accomplish in life, no matter how long we lived, isn't my own invention. I first heard it spoken in Swedish at a funeral while I was still alive. The corpse at that particular rite of passage was an obtuse and unpopular shipyard foreman named Per Olaf Rosenquist. He had died young, or what was thought to be young in those days, because he, like James Wait,had inherited a defective heart. I went to the funeral with a fellow welder named Hjalmar Arvid BostrÃm, not that it can matter much what anybody's name was a million years ago. As we left the church, BostrÃm said to me: "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

I asked him if this black joke was original, and he said no, that he had heard it from his German grandfather, who had been an officer in charge of burying the dead on the Western Front during World War One. It was common for soldiers new to that sort of work to wax philosophical over this corpse or that one, into whose face he was about to shovel dirt, speculating about what he might have done if he hadn't died so young. There were many cynical things a veteran might say to such a thoughtful recruit, and one of those was: "Don't worry about it. He wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

Looking back over a million years of evolution since his own death, the mysterious, disembodied author of the book says something even more telling - but we can hear another author talking, talking about his art, about his legacy, but most of all about the only thing we all have in common:

I have written these words in air -- with the tip of the index finger of my left hand...Does it trouble me to write so insubstantially, with air on air? Well -- my words will be as enduring as anything my father wrote, or Shakespeare wrote, or Beethoven wrote, or Darwin wrote. It turns out that they all wrote with air on air, and I now pluck this thought of Darwin's from the balmy atmosphere:
"Progress has been much more general than retrogression."