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Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
Posted at 12:00 PM on April 12, 2007
by Jacquie Fuller
(7 Comments)
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at age 84. I try not to get too bummed out about the passing of people I don't even know, but Vonnegut has a special place in my heart. In high school, I devoured his books. His pointed humor and cynicism struck a chord within the teenaged me, that still resounds in me at 33. Vonnegut made me want to write, and gave me permission to write whatever the hell I wanted--reality was not a boundary. As a public figure, he seemed warm, generous, and gracious--something you don't see too often in this day and age, when celebrity writers act and are treated like rock stars. Vonnegut was a rock star, but he acted like your curmudgeonly old uncle.
This morning on The Morning Show, a listener, Meg, sent us a link to an awesome site that catalogs bands influenced by Vonnegut. Apparently, for instance, Elvis Costello's "Man Out of Time" was based on Billy Pilgrim, the main character in Slaughterhouse Five. (Which, by the way, continues to be pretty timely book these days.) Thanks for the link, Meg. And thanks to all the folks who sent their Vonnegut tribute suggestions to The Morning Show, including Carol in Blue Earth, whose favorite quote from The Sirens of Titan is this:
Just imagine that your Daddy is the smartest man who ever lived on Earth, and he knows everything there is to find out, and he is exactly right about everything, and he can prove he is right about everything. Now imagine another little child on some nice world a million light years away, and that little child’s Daddy is the smartest man who ever lived on that nice world so far away. And he is just as smart and just as right as your Daddy is. Both Daddies are smart, and both Daddies are right.
Carol says it's a "great passage that shows his goal of world peace ... the universe has room for all kinds of people to be right and not agree."
Here's my Vonnegut story. I saw him read about ten years ago in a packed college auditorium. After an hour reading and a lengthy Q&A, he said to the audience, "Now I have a question for you." He asked if we'd ever had a teacher dramatically impact our lives for the better. We all nodded. Then he said, "I want you to turn to the person next to you and say that teacher's name aloud." And we did. An entire auditorium rang with the music of these names...
And then Vonnegut walked off stage without a word.
Comments (7)
“We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap,” he once suggested carving into a wall on the Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures. :) He'll always be in my top five authors.
His "Player Piano" is one of my favorite books of all time. It is his most down to Earth story that, in my opinion, is quite telling of how our economy is going to be in the next 50-100 years.
So it goes.
Bill Wareham, the News Director at MPR, brought up a really great point on the MPR News Grid about the multi-generational appeal of Vonnegut. It warms me to imagine my daughter's daughter reading Slaughterhouse Five. What chills me is knowing she'll probably live in a world where that book will be as timely as it is now.
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