Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has, at the age of 84, finally said goodbye to all that.
Below I post the final paragraph of his delightful and crazy and dangerous and apocalyptic Cat's Cradle (the blue-white poison Vonnegut refers to in the following is called Ice-nine which freezes everything it touches):
If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.
I think of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. as a romantic who witnessed the awful truth about humans and life, and so could be said to have become cynical and resigned, but he was more than that to me. I believe he was gifted, funny, profound, simple and distressed; an avatar of divine wit and sadness. He kept many demons at arm's length with his mordant fiction and casual brilliance, and helped me to feel that there was a writer out there who sang perfect songs of sympathy and pain, imbecility and malice, and did it with a music that before him had not been heard. So it goes, as he was known to write.
Thank you Kurt Vonnegut, for having existed. That you have existed is an eternal verity that cannot be denied.
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Last rites as Kurt wrote them:
The Bokononist way of saying it:
I shoulda been asleep hours ago. Then I heard about Vonnegut and damn, it brings back so much. I have loaned out so many damn copies of The Sirens of Titan that I finally got one and swore I would never loan it to anybody but would find another one if I met somebody who needed to read it, and damn all but I can't find it anywhere and realize it's been gone for years.
Wampeters, Foma and Granfaloons is another good one, just a collection, essays, might have been some stories, and the perfect depiction of an asshole: *
I'm so damn sad that he's gone but at the same time in some weird way happy for him. The child of a suicide is always fascinated and repelled by death; he tried it himself years back, failed, and seemed to resign himself to go on living but I'm not sure he ever really enjoyed it. I hope he had joy rather than fear in the passing, whatever if anything comes after.
As Hecate's people put it (it ain't Bokonist but I like it anyway, and really perhaps there aint' that much difference): May the Goddess protect him; may he find his way to the Summerlands. May his friends and his family know peace.
Another tribute
Here's what I posted at my house...
Old age and injuries from a fall have finally done what the firebombing of Dresden, attempted suicide, and years of smoking could not: claimed the life of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Perhaps there was no one better to write our epitaph for when Bush gets us all killed, so it's a damn shame he's gone when we needed him most.
Perhaps his collected works are the epitaph for when Bush gets us all killed.
If you haven't yet treated yourself to reading every word he ever wrote, I suggest you start right now with Cat's Cradle or his sagely essay collection A Man Without a Country.
From there, life's chrono-synclastic infundibulum will pull you into a body of work that is wonderfully, paradoxically both pithy and digressive.
You'll be entertained, you'll be sadder, and you'll be wiser. You'll fall in love with our crazy species, and you won't be surprised when we're gone.
So it goes.
www.vastleft.com
He was valiant
lovely and worthy thoughts for Vonnegut - thankyou MJS & Xan and vastleft
His description of the fire-bombing of Dresden is fundamental to understanding the second half of the 20th century, and it'll have relevance in all the coming centuries.
From the NYTimes obit: The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”
After such knowledge, what forgiveness. He looked despair in the face and continued to write and to speak out. Valiant.
VLWC Vonnegut tribute part II
Here.