Odd Still Life

He is gone. His words will live on forever. His life will stand as a lesson to us all. His work will be like textbooks.

I have very few words to write about a man that I admired more than I could admire almost any teacher or diplomat or great man. His novels and essays speak for themselves, and say far more than I could ever imagine.

For those of you who haven’t heard: Kurt Vonnegut, one of the greatest thinkers and writers (in my personal opinion) has died. He lived about sixty years longer than anyone could have ever expected him to. He was a father to many children and a teacher to hundreds of thousands more.

He is often compared to Mark Twain and I would guess that he did not object too long or hard to that. I suppose he was the Twain for the twentieth century.

I have not read every word he has ever written (yet). But it is a thing I will strive to do in the future. I know that as a writer (unpublished, just yet) I have always wished I could write as he does (did). It was not simple for him, but it is simple for us (the readers).

Those who do not understand his writings need not try so hard. Read it twice or three times. It won’t hurt you. (Cat’s Cradle is a good start.) It’s easy to read and it only takes a while for the words to sink in. Maybe it’s like how you feel when you lie down on the ground on a sunny day and can see only sky above you. It’s hard to comprehend that you are basically staring into infinity. Or maybe it’s like the thing kids do when they take a mirror and try to walk around by only looking down into the mirror. (When you do this outside its like your body imagines that you’re flying. You get a tingly, sort of light-headed feeling. I always get that tingly feeling when I’m reading Vonnegut. The feeling I’ve always imagined is my Soul letting me know it still exists.)

Knowing about his life makes me realize that there is still so much in humanity to be proud of, so that we can point to it and say “A person, a man, a human being, did that and something else and even something better.” His passing will leave a hole that not even every word ever written could fill, but the fact that he existed and did things and wrote things and lived things gives us the hope that there are others out there who might have learned at his feet (or at least from his books and stories).

I say to you, whomever may read this, Kurt Vonnegut was a man. He lived a long life. He saw much and lived much that would’ve destroyed another man. He was a writer and a thinker. He has died. “So it goes.”