Vonnegone.

Kurt Vonnegut passed away on April 11 — he was one of my favorite authors.  Even though I’ve been reading his work since I was very young, in the last decade or so he has had a profound influence on the way I’ve been shaping my world view (and still am to this day).  He was a Humanist, and as such has a philosophy that had become particularly inspiring to me over the years when presented through his fiction and non-fiction works.  I’ll let Kurt explain in his own words:

“Do you know what a Humanist is? I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

We had a memorial services for Isaac a few years back, and at one point I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to a group of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, ‘Kurt is up in Heaven now.’ That’s my favorite joke.”

And from Hocus Pocus (1990)

“I have looked up who the Freethinkers were. They were members of a short-lived sect, mostly of German descent, who believed, as did my Grandfather Wills, that nothing but sleep awaited good and evil persons alike in the Afterlife, that science had proved all organized religions to be baloney, that God was unknowable, and that the greatest use a person could make of his or her lifetime was to improve the quality of life for all in his or her community.”

I reread his novels frequently.  Every few years I’ll go the full cycle and start again.  His are some of the few books I will reread with this soft of frequency.  While his writing tended to be dark and humorous, it also had a tendency to build characters that could, and had to, stand on their own and face the horrors that plagued them with as much grace as they could muster.  Without knowing it, I was being taught a number of very important lessons, and only recently have I been able to see them for what they are.

I won’t say that Vonnegut’s passing has come as a shock… a surprise, yes, shock no.  He’d been complaining for years that he was pissed that smoking hadn’t killed him with cancer yet, and that he was going to sue the R.J. Reynolds company for false advertising, because it says plainly on the box that his Pall Malls would cause cancer.  I had expected him to kill himself before too long, and the unfortunate fact is, he fell and sustained head trauma that eventually just shut him off like a switch weeks later.  Such a shame.  Such a morbid way to go for a man who prized his intelligence.

Still, I’m sad to see him go.

Kurt is up in Heaven now.