So It Goes

Listen:

Kurt Vonnegut is dead. He always quipped that he was "committing suicide by cigarette," and it finally worked.

So it goes.

He will live on in his writing. He had a unique gift for conveying profound truths through simple reductionism - stepping back from everyday life like an anthropologist would (he actually did have an M.A. in anthropology), and explaining conventions in such simple terms as to reveal their absurdities. (I still remember how, in the beginning of Breakfast of Champions, he called the American National Anthem "gibberish sprinkled with quotation marks.")

What Mark Twain was to the 19th century, Kurt Vonnegut was to the 20th. Whereas Mark Twain revealed the insecurities of a post Civil War America, Vonnegut exposed the incoherencies and hypocrisies of the America that emerged after WWII. America after the war was catapulted from depression to prosperity, from devastating world war to nuclear brinksmanship in a cold war. Advances in science had improved our quality of life, while simultaneously improving our capacity to take away life. And Vonnegut, the master satirist, was there to write about it all, with a simple, honest narrative voice that had the power to make you look at the world with fresh eyes.

As he dedicated the library at Connecticut College thirty years ago, Vonnegut had this to say:

By reading the writings of some of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate not only with our own poor minds, but with those interesting minds, too.
This to me is a miracle.
Yes - and when I speak of interesting minds, I am not limiting my admiration to belletrists, to poets and story tellers and elegant essayists and the like. We should be equally in love with astronomers and physicists and mathematicians and chemists and engineeers - cooks, bakers, mechanics, musicians - people telling, sometimes clumsily, sometimes not, what they have perceived as the truths of their trades.
On occasion, even children have written instructively. Anne Frank was a child.
So much for that.

If Vonnegut's worldview could be encapsulated in one sentence, it would be 'so much for that'.

Rest in peace, Mr. Vonnegut. And thank you.