Ocelopotamus

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

Today the world is a little less kind than it was yesterday.

American literary idol Kurt Vonnegut, best known for such classic novels as “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle,” died on Tuesday night in Manhattan at age 84, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Longtime family friend, Morgan Entrekin, who reported Vonnegut’s death, said the writer had suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, the newspaper reported.

Oddly enough, just a few weeks ago a college friend of mine emailed me to ask if I was a Vonnegut fan. He’d started reading Slaughterhouse-Five and remembered a random reference I’d made to Tralfamadorians in an earlier email.

Here’s what I wrote him back:

Oh, yes. He was an early, primary influence on my worldview and writing style. I discovered him as a freshman in high school and I read 11 of his books (everything the high school library had) in something like two months. It was one of those moments you have as a young person when you feel your perspective coalescing. I remember saying to my sister something like, “Kurt Vonnegut is the only one who *understands.*”

After a few years I got to where I’d read too *much* Vonnegut — you know that feeling where you overindulge on a certain food and then you suddenly never want it again? I do that with writers, too. I read so much of them that I internalize their voices and start to feel like I’m imitating them too much in my own work. It’s like needing to move out of your literary parents’ house. You love them, but you have to get away for a while.

So it had been almost 15 years since I’d read any Vonnegut when, a few years ago, a local theater company staged an excellent adaptation of Cat’s Cradle, which got me in the mood to revisit him. I ended up re-reading Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and The Sirens of Titan, and really enjoyed reconnecting with them from an adult perspective. I was gratified to find that his work still holds up and that in some ways, he’s even better than I remembered.

I would say that the famous epitaph of Kilgore Trout is still pretty much the core of my value system:

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”

I think everyone ought to read a stack of Vonnegut books starting at about age 14, or as soon as possible thereafter. I think the world would be a wiser and better place for it.

Also: although Mother Night is not a book about being gay, and (as best I can recall at the moment) there are no gay characters in it, the fact remains that nobody has ever written a better book about what it’s like to live in the closet. Reading that book helped me tear down the wall dividing one half of my psyche from the other — the wall that came from growing up gay in a deeply homophobic time and culture.

Vonnegut’s Wikipedia entry quotes a Rolling Stone article from August 2006:

He has stalled finishing his highly anticipated novel If God Were Alive Today — or so he claims. “I’ve given up on it … It won’t happen. … The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people’s discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, ‘Please, I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?’ That’s what I feel right now. I’ve written books. Lots of them. Please, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Can I go home now?”

Yes, Mr. Vonnegut. You can go home now, with honors.

Kurt Vonnegut is dead, but the Tralfamadorians know he’s still alive in all the moments in time in which he helped messed-up teenagers — of all ages — find a little bit of sense in a senseless world.

He was a victim of a series of accidents. As are we all.

So it goes.

(h/t NZBC)

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UPDATE: Tom Tomorrow has a postcard he got from Kurt Vonnegut a couple of years ago up on This Modern World.