Home in Henderson is deeply saddened to report that author Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the age of 84.
You can read the details here.
I was introduced to Vonnegut’s off-beat humor and irreverent wit at the tender and impressionable age of thirteen, when so many of us are susceptible to the influences that will shape us for a lifetime. My gateway into his world, one that I hope I never really left, was Breakfast of Champions, a book my parents carelessly left on the shelf of the family library, along with other books young children shouldn’t be left alone with, like Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and The Joy of Cooking.
It didn’t take more than a few pages until I was hooked. Page 5, in fact, when the author explained that this is how he draws an ***-hole:
© 1973 Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, Dell Publishing, Inc., used by permission.
Okay, granted, I didn’t get it all during that first read. But I’ve read it lots more since then.
After that, I was a Vonnegut junkie. After I had mainlined all of the Vonnegut that my parents had left scattered on the library shelves, I hunted through bookstores looking for a fix.
I asked the German exchange teacher how to pronounce Slaughterhouse-Five in German just to get a feeling of authenticity. Also, I didn’t like her and I figured that bringing up the war would piss her off.
It worked. Go figure.
I spent my rarely earned allowance (my parents actually expected me to do my chores; I took a more relaxed view on the issue) on a copy of Venus on the Half-Shell by Vonnegut’s alter-ego Kilgore Trout only to discover that it was hidden on my parents’ shelves. Mom got a big kick out of that. It was okay, in the end, though, because I ended up wearing one of those copies out.
Their copy.
Each time I finished one of his books, I felt like my best friend had just moved to New Jersey.
For me, Vonnegut brought a sense of irreverence to what he wrote. He tore at the bastions of society, of conventional morality and religion, but unlike those who seek to raze American culture with no idea of what will replace it, he offered alternatives, enticing pathways into the wilderness of ideas upon which he would give a not-so-gentle shove and dare the reader to explore.
Vonnegut spent many years in the wasteland of underground publishers, hardly known and definitely underappreciated. Unlike many writers who, upon breaking into the mainstream, go off of tangents of Eastern mysticism or chic Continental philosophy, he stuck to his purely American roots.
Vonnegut understood what it was to be an American; to try to separate the dross of beer commercials and game shows from life and gut it down to its bare essentials and make sense of it all. His characters are cottage-craft homespun: car dealers, guttersnipes, wealthy dilettantes, waitresses, and regular G.I.s — loaded with all the faults and flaws to which humanity is heir. They are American folk living American lives as best they can and, like you and me, trying to derive purpose in the world as they at the same time come to grips with how incomprehensibe and, even more frightening, utterly meaningless the world can be.
In Slaughterhouse-Five the protagonist Billy Pilgrim spends part of his life as a zoo exhibit on the planet Tralfamador. The four-dimensional Tralfamadorans, who experience time all at once, know the exact moment at which the universe ends. A pilot testing a new fuel presses a button and blows up the universe. Billy exclaiims that something must be done to prevent it, but the Tralfamadorans only express embarassment at his remark. The end of the universe has already happened, they tell him.
The end is inexorable, Vonnegut teaches us. What is important is the moment.
Yet there is always hope at the conclusion of Vonnegut’s novels, for, in the end, there is always life. Often it is for the reader to divine the philosophical cornerstone upon which that life will be based, but is that not true for each of us, every day of our lives?
Vonnegut was one of my best friends all through high school. While my classmates were carving “AC/DC” into the desks during boring lectures, I was reading Player Piano behind my notebook.
I didn’t date a lot in high school.
However, Vonnegut made me think, question, and take a sidelong upside-down mirror-image view of the world and shape me into the contemplative man I aspire to be today. Even though we never met, he was my friend, and the world of letters is poorer for his loss.
“Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”