RIP Kurt Vonnegut

Thursday, April 12, 2007

It is so strange - I didn't think about Kurt Vonnegut as a man that much. Didn't think about him in any fashion, really, except as peripherally involved somehow in works such as Breakfast of Champions, Palm Sunday, and the Sirens of Titan. In some way, I think that is the sign of the best authors - you don't think of them of the "creators" of their work, because they've made their work that real for you, if only for the time that you've got your nose buried in their book. I didn't really think all that much about Vonnegut as a man except in, naturally, the autobiographical Palm Sunday. Despite the bits and pieces of Vonnegut that you knew were woven into so many of his characters, I never thought of Vonnegut as MORE real or tangible than any of them. Yet despite all this, his death seems starkly more real, if only for a short while, than anything in his books. Would he have wanted that? Likely not, since death (and mortality, and flaws) were starkly real in EVERY thing he created.

All the same, he will be missed. The well of his particular genius has just become, in some ways, finite. KV - rest in peace.