Post by Shonokin on Apr 13, 2007 8:40:05 GMT -8
from the lantern
Wednesday night, America lost one of its finest. Kurt Vonnegut died at 84 after being hospitalized for brain damage he received from a fall last month. Vonnegut's wife, Jill Kremetz, reported his death.
Vonnegut was a voice for a post-war generation that found itself lost adrift in a vast, new world. His most famous work, "Slaughterhouse Five, or "The Children's Crusade," published in 1969, is inhabited by weird worlds and a multi-dimensional universe, with its protagonist Billy Pilgrim experiencing the Allies' 1945 fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany - an event experienced by Vonnegut himself. In this work, Vonnegut managed to capture the thoughts of a then racially-divided and war-scared 1960s generation. He deftly translated his experiences in World War II to the Vietnam War and left readers asking for more.
He is credited with giving a voice to the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Even today, he is widely read by college and high school students, who are looking toward humor to make sense of our mixed-up world.
Vonnegut is often compared to the humorist Mark Twain. Both authors were able to take serious material, such as war and slavery, and discuss its inherently negative qualities with a deft joke or a quick pun. (He tackled religion in "The Sirens of Titan" and "Cat's Cradle," a novel where the world is destroyed by a super-virus called Ice-Nine that immediately causes water to freeze at room temperature.)
Last year, Vonnegut visited Ohio State and hundreds gathered to hear the author speak. Unfortunately, many were denied entrance because of lack of space. Those lucky enough to hear him, were greeted with the author's distaste for current President George Bush and the Iraq war. Although old enough to a grandfather to many college students, he was still able to connect to us on both emotional and intellectual levels. Vonnegut told students at the event that his main words of wisdom are to take each day as it comes.
"We've got several nice days ahead of us. And what the alcoholics do - what they're told to do, what they try to do - is live just one day at a time," he said at the event. "So we'll do that too... Hey, this was a pretty damn good day, and tomorrow might be one too. Be grateful for good days and say, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
So it goes.
