So It Goes

I got an e-mail from James this morning. The subject line read "sad sad" and the entire message consisted of the word "news". What else is there to say?

Kurt Vonnegut is dead, and the world is a little worse.

In high school and my first year of college, Vonnegut was my absolute favorite writer. It wasn't even close. J.D. Salinger was a distant number two. I bought all of his novels and read and reread them obsessively. Some of them- Cat's Cradle (the first Vonnegut I read, in the form of a disintegrating paperback passed to me in eighth grade by James that I read until it finished disintegrating) Breakfast of Champions, of course Slaughterhouse-Five- I read those at least half a dozen times, maybe more.

It's been a long time since I've read any of his books. In fact, they are all packed away in a box in the crawl space. On Saturday evening I dug out the tattered copy of Breakfast of Champions that Rachel gave me as a Christmas present in high school, because I needed a quote from it for a paper I was writing about characters interacting with their authors.

I still haven't read what turned out to be his last book- Man Without A Country. I'll certainly buy a copy the next time I'm in a book store. It makes me sad that it took Vonnegut's death to motivate me to read it. (Apparently I'm far from alone on this. I was just looking at Amazon, and Vonnegut has two books in their top ten sellers, and five in their top hundred. )

I no longer believe, as I once vehemently did, that Vonnegut was the greatest living American writer (I used to be outraged every year when the Nobel Prize for literature was given to people like Dario Fo [I'm still not entirely sure who he is] instead of Vonnegut. Then I worked out that the Nobel Prize was as meaningful or meaningless as the Oscars.] But there is no question that the books meant the whole world to me at one point. In fact, it's hard to imagine a much more ideal union of reader and writer- two cynical, depressed, joke-cracking, chain-smoking atheists laughing together at a world that never stops trying to bring us to tears. Vonnegut's sense of humor, ranging from Sacred Profanity to the Profanely Sacred will be greatly missed, almost as much as the great man himself.

Without Kurt Vonnegut, I'd be a very different reader, which is the exact same thing as saying I'd be a very different person.

We were lucky to have had him, and to have had him as long as we did.

"I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, 'Isaac is up in Heaven now.' That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored."
-Kurt Vonnegut, "God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian"