Eulogy for Kurt Vonnegut

(Normally, on Thursdays, I post my Current Obsessions. But, out of a somber respect for Mr. Vonnegut, I shall postpone until tomorrow.)

Quote of the Day: "You talk about the gluttonous Roaring Twenties. That was nothing. We're crazy, going crazy, about petroleum. It's a drug like crack cocaine. Of course, the lunatic fringe of Christianity is welcoming the end of the world as the rapture. So I'm Jeremiah. It's going to have to stop. I'm sorry."
-Kurt Vonnegut, RollingStone, August 2006

As usual, in the above quote Kurt Vonnegut hints at an imminent apocalypse, and he's been doing it since before I was born, and yet I still agree with him. I'm convinced, and somehow I'm able to deal with it due to the healthy dose of cynicism instilled in me by Vonnegut himself.

In addition to his darkly humorous way of helping me cope with my dire environment, Vonnegut provides a new, fresh perspective, which is why Cat's Cradle or Slaughterhouse-5 sits on so many dormitory bookshelves. In high school, I think most of us have that experience where we get high with friends and discuss how time is a man-made concept, and it seems like a huge epiphany. Then we graduate and realized that pretty much everybody has had that same discussion.

So it's a simple philosophy. But in Slaughterhouse-5 Vonnegut makes it a complex one. Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time," and we're presented a world in which time actually is an uncontrollable confinement. It's undeniably brilliant.

And so it goes. Vonnegut's work, "deceptively simple" as my father so eloquently describes it, forces the reader, in compulsively readable terms, to acknowledge the barriers humans create for themselves. It's absurdly profound.

Through his dark subject matter, his frightening apocalyptic visions, and his portrayal of self-consuming human nature--that strange tendency to lock ourselves in--one is suddenly liberated, and we can breathe again. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut, and thanks for the real epiphanies.