I hate this, I hate how often this space turns into a memorial for the dead, and sometimes I think I never want to write another piece commemorating a fallen hero.
Then Kurt Vonnegut dies, and I have to write another.
Fuck.
To many of us, Vonnegut was a hero not because of his writing...although we should probably talk about that, shouldn't we? His writing, I mean. One of the best authors of the twentieth century? Nah, one of the best writers ever. Consider, most obviously, Slaughterhouse Five. Consider, too, Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater, the criminally underrated Jailbird or the splendid collection of short fiction Welcome To The Monkey House.
Or don't consider them. Fine. Then consider his work as an essayist, like this observation about criticism of Mr. Bush's Iraq adventure: "By saying our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas..."
Maybe it wasn't the quality of Vonnegut's writing that so many of us (and by so many of us, I mean millions of people around the world, but more specifically, me) responded to, but his moral tone, the sense we found a voice we could trust, someone willing to tell the truth, which boiled down to this: Nothing means anything. Life is random. Try to do good. People die.
And maybe the greatest thing Vonnegut ever accomplished wasn't to do with his writing, but simply the fact that he lived until the age of 84, and when he finally went, it was for a purely random reason--he'd fallen a few weeks ago, and suffered severe brain damage.
But in all those years, he did not commit suicide, although he tried, as did his son, as did his Mom, who succeeded--she killed herself on Mother's Day in 1944, while young Kurt was in the Army, part of the journey that led him to capture by Nazis, to imprisonment in Dresden, where he was witness to the Allied bombing of the city, and where he helped gather the numerous corpses of innocent people, killed by his own side, where he watched as the nameless, numberless corpses were set ablaze.
His life was full of grief, he considered his madness genetic, he raged against a world so senseless and cruel, yet he pressed on, told the truth, and goddammit, lived a pretty good life. We should all do the same.
