Inspirational, Sort Of

At morning assembly the other day this little couplet popped into my head, as if from nowhere: Fish gotta swim, bird gotta fly, / Man gotta ask himself the reason why. I entitled it Existential Song on the spot. Even at the moment of inception though I was aware it wasn't exactly from nowhere. It had clearly been provoked by the musings on rabbits, eagles and ducks and their various abilities issuing from the podium. And by the time we were leaving the assembly ground I had the distinct feeling that it wasn't mine at all.

It popped back into my head later in the morning when I was teaching a bit of Albert Camus, and I recited it to a rather startled class, advising them to go forth and google it. By this time I had grown to suspect I'd remembered it from somewhere in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, the likeliest novel being the wonderful Cat's Cradle. (By the way, just as a side issue, if you happen to be a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old reading this with an inquiring mind, you could do no better than to get a copy of said novel, or Slaughterhouse 5, or The Sirens of Titan, or Mother Night, and change your outlook on life forever.)

I followed my own advice about the googling, though I always use Yahoo for some primitive reason, and, yes, I was right, though I'd managed to misquote a bit. (Well, it was about forty years ago, after all.) But what I'd never realised was that our favourite American humorist was in turn pastiching a line from the musical Showboat.

And there was I, thinking I might have had an original thought.