God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, the humanist, is up in heaven now. (his joke, not mine.)
So it goes. (his words, not mine)
I don’t know what else to say, really. He said it so well himself, and his words meant so much to so many of us, and will go on doing the same. I know this will sound trite, just another cheap indie kid and his cheap indie blog trying to be hip by liking all the right things and being sad in all the right ways — like when Elliot Smith died and we were all sincerely sad and sincerely touched by him, but we couldn’t quite say it right, couldn’t make it sound authentic, because of the homogenized hum of cheap indie kids, myself included, all saying the same thing, reminding us that we were unoriginal, no matter how hip and sad and indie… Nonetheless:
Behind Jesus, and that small cluster of people in my life that I have loved, perhaps no human has meant more to me than Kurt Vonnegut. When I read “Breakfast of Champions,” my first book of Vonnegut’s, I was bursting with the discovery that an author had been allowed to be so blindingly honest, absurd, and funny. He made sense of the madness by making it hilarious — and not just that, he made the cruelty less cruel by making it poetic, tragic, ironic, and beautiful. He saw evil people doing evil and senseless things in an evil world, so he pointed at those people and laughed. And, he saw tiny little people doing tiny little bits of good in the midst of the chaos and was quick to empathize with their plight, with our plight as humans. May we all point at the evil and laugh. And may we all humbly and wrecklessly write our stories, pursue our craft, like Kilgore Trout did, even when rest of the world takes almost no notice at all, and our art finds no place but between dirty pictures in dirty magazines. Because, who knows, a timequake could occurr at any moment, and when it ends someone will have to remind the world we have free will again, and we will be just the people for the job.
God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut.