"I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh,
accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I
was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the
First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh
hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

 "It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that
millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one and
another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that
minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence
was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can
remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

 "Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred.
Veterans' day is not.

 "So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will
keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

 "What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

 "And all music is."

 -- "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut, 1973