"When I think about my own death, I don't console myself with the idea that my descendants and my books and all that will live on. Anybody with any sense knows that the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by. I honestly believe, though, that we are wrong to think that moments go away, never to be seen again. This moment and every moment lasts forever."
--from the book Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, "Reflections On My Own Death", 1972
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Listen:
Kurt Vonnegut is dead.
His book Breakfast Of Champions saved my life. I was ready to kill myself before I read it. I'd already tried once before to commit suicide, and I was set on doing it again when I read the book at age 16.
After reading it and laughing hysterically through tears, I made up my mind to never try and take my own life again.
Oddly enough, I feel no sorrow for his passing. He should have been dead a long time ago, when he was hunkered down in an underground bunker enduring the above-ground bombing of Dresden in 1945. Instead, he survived, and began writing, and became famous for his unique point-of-view, and his books and their collective messages somehow fell into my hands, and few things in my life changed me like his prose.
Of all the authors I ever read who inspired me, Vonnegut was the most invigorating. I learned to laugh in self-defense, and treat the negative on an equal measure with the positive. I haven't always been successful at it, but it's an ongoing process that will know no end until I am buried.
One day, maybe I'll get it right.
In the meantime, his passing is yet another sign that I am most likely reading too much into but nevertheless accepting for what it is: a signal for me to finish my own novel, ten years in the making and largely influenced by Vonnegut's style. In a way, he has always been my literary model: he didn't get famous until his later years, and by then he'd accumulated a definite outlook and voice that no one could ever duplicate, despite their best efforts.
Vonnegut made me slow down my pace. He made it okay for me to not be in a hurry to achieve fame and accolades for writing. His life was an example for me of how to let life wash over you as you take notes. Every time I ever got depressed and thought I'd never amount to anything except a frustrated writer living in abject poverty, I always thought of Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's alter ego and favorite protagonist. Trout took his time and was deemed crazy by his peers, but he never stopped writing. He just kept on doing it, and it was Vonnegut's way of saying that a writer should not only love what he/she does, but that practice makes perfect, and being prolific is not the same as being rich and famous and well-known.
I learned that a writer should amass experiences worth writing about before even contemplating putting them down on paper. Vonnegut's traumatic life was the template for his entire public persona, even as he insisted that things like Dresden or his mother's suicide or the indignities of mankind had nothing to do with his writing.
As a tribute, this weekend I'm going to re-read one of his novels. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of Champions on me-- that one got stolen or lost somewhere down the road years ago, like most great works of art.
Maybe I'll rent Champions from the library, but I also have Slaughterhouse Five and several other volumes of his work in my possession. But even if I don't read any of his books again in the near future, it's alright because I feel like every day I am re-reading his works in some way, shape or form.
Vonnegut's fiction (and later non-fiction) gave birth to me. It made me. It created me. It shaped me. It possessed me. It runs in my veins as surely and steadily as blood.
I owe him big. And if I ever meet him in the afterlife or on the astral plane or wherever it is that our souls go when we eventually perish, I'll be sure to let him know what he meant to me.
But for now, I think the best way to do that is to just finish the novel. Even though he's not around to appreciate it, by finishing the book I will have given back to him what he gave to me so long ago.
And what did he give me? Just for the record, he gave me back to me. Though we never met, he told me that it was okay to be me, and to like writing, and to pursue it no matter what happens or comes my way.
It won't be necessary to dedicate my first novel to him, because every word that I write is an implicit dedication to him already.
God bless your soul, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
And thanks again for the laughter, the tears, and the inspiration.
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