In Memoriam: Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007
April 12th, 2007 by Matt
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. I felt I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least give him a mention on this site, because he did, unbeknownst to him, three powerful things for me:
- He taught me that writing can meld humor and humanism.
- He filled my coffee cup to the brim with a desire to write.
- He further convinced me that, while we’re an ugly species at times, we have the capacity for goodness.
Mr. Vonnegut was the author of 14 novels, most notably Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and the mild-melting and heart-opening Slaughterhouse-Five. The latter was a fictionalization of his experience as a POW army infantryman who managed to survive the fire-bombing of Dresden. I say fictionalization because, on top of the depictions of WWII, this thing is chock-full of aliens, time-warping, and humans on display as zoo animals (for the aforementioned extraterrestrials). The book is hilarious and horrifying and humanizing. It’s utterly brilliant. And it’s one of the treasures of American literature. If you haven’t read it, please do. Given the current state of war in the world, it seems like a timely novel because, as his writings suggest, all wars are part of the same war.
If you have read Slaughterhouse-Five, let me recommend my second favorite Vonnegut book, the rather under-the-radar novel, Slapstick. It’s weird as all hell, and in my opinion, it’s weird in all the right ways.
I’ll leave you, and my discussion of him, with some of my favorite Vonnegut quotations:
- “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
- “If you really want to disappoint your parents, and don’t have the nerve to be gay, go into the arts.”
- “And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’ “
- “I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can’t help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what He or She is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.”
- From Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons: “A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends.”
- From God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘[Damn] it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”
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