When, where, and how did the Nihileafs learn to read?!?! It matters not I suppose. Brump’s musings on reading and the thoughts of angels is not an original, if you will pardon the repetition, thought. By that I mean it has been forced upon Brump by me and it is not an original idea of mine. Rather it comes from Kurt Vonnegut and what I can only assume is his angelic mind. This homage (if it can be passed off as that) to Vonnegut bastardizes a passage from his collected speeches “If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?”, where Vonnegut contemplates that people,
“by reading well, can think the thoughts of the wisest and most interesting human minds throughout all history…even if they themselves have only mediocre intellects, they do it with the thoughts of angels.”
One can easily see the shamelessness of my stealing from a great literary mind by pilfering not only the thoughts, but also specific words – ‘wisest’, ‘mediocre’, ‘intellect’, and ‘thoughts of angels’ – that make the passage profound. I did take some artistic liberty in the passage, tailoring it to Brump, particularly by removing mention of humans, who are irrelevant to the Nihileafs, and broadening it to all thoughts in existence. If this brazen copying is tasteless, know that I only do it because I think it is one of the ‘wisest and most profound thoughts’ from one of the ‘wisest and most interesting human minds’ (and also because it wouldn’t work as a comic between Stoke and Raven). There is also the added ironic reality that there are no books for the Nihileafs to read. So it goes. – Zachary