Sad News

Sad: Kurt Vonnnegut is dead.

As a young teen, I approached Vonnegut from odd angles, almost as if to sneak up on him. I believe I Player Piano was my first, although it may have actually been Cat's Cradle; regardless, I loved them both. In those pages, I saw a man like my grandfather: scholarly, but not pretentious; curmudgeonly, but only at first glance. I saw a man who saw the absurdity of his fellow humans and didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

I quickly read Breakfast of Champions, and The Sirens of Titan, and Welcome to the Monkey House, although I know I read an abridged version of "Harrison Bergeron" in a Reader's Digest much earlier. And then Galapagos. And Blue Beard.

The last book I read by him was Mother Night, one of his early novels, funny enough. In it, he describes the madness of the Nazis in what is, to me, the most accessible explanation: he compares sanity to the teeth of a gear on a watch spinning 'round; for most people, all of the teeth are there, and so the watch functions as you would expect; for the Nazis, the teeth that tell you that killing others or that hating someone for nothing other than their race is wrong were missing, and so, while most of the time they seemed as ordinary as you or I, occasionally those gears would slip, and they would act in the most horrible ways imaginable. The gears, you see, just... slip.

I have put off reading Slaughterhouse-Five because it's one of those books with a tremendously impressive legacy to it; I have, in fact, been intimidated by it, which is truly odd, because I am not the sort to be intimidated by books, especially not Vonnegut's books. And so, now, I think I will go about securing a copy so that I can visit my old friend one more time, so that he can show me, once more, how absurd people can be, even when they can also be so grand.

Goodnight, Mr. Vonnegut, Kurt. We will do what we can to carry on down here and improve the lots of our fellow human beings. And hyperevolved seals.

'If I were a younger man, I'd write down the entire stupidity of the human race, then I'd put to my lips the blue-white poison that makes statues of men, and I'd thumb my nose at You Know Who.'
--Bokonon, Kurt Vonnegut, "Cats Cradle"