"Armageddon in Retrospect"

Just caught up with Kurt Vonnegut's posthumously-published Armageddon in Retrospect: And Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace.  It's introduced by his son Mark, who observes that his Dad was "an optimist posing as a pessimist" who believed in writing as a spiritual exercise. It did not come easy to him.

He rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, muttering whatever he had just written over and over, tilting his head back and forth, gesturing with his hands, changing the pitch and rhythm of the words. Then he would pause, thoughtfully rip the barely written-on sheet of typing paper from the typewriter, crumple it up, throw it away, and start over again.

Makes me miss my old Smith-Corona, as well as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He said:

We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectations of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife... We don't fear death, and neither should you. 

And then he said "I thank you for your attention, and I'm out of here." Simple, honest, clear. Thankfully the books remain.

the secret of life

Vonnegut family values

Noticed an Indiana license plate the other day, inscribed "In God We Trust," and was reminded of the deep conservative strain in many of the Hoosiers I have known. Most of them are stand-up human beings who'd give you the shirts off their backs, etc., but there does seem to be something very traditional about that neck of the heartland that imprints itself ineradicably on its natives. The land of Quayle's coded "family values" seems no seed-ground for free thinkers. (It did spawn some public-spirited libertarians dedicated to spending, lavishly and liberally, the interest of Pierre Goodrich's fortune... I enjoyed my Stoic weekend in Indy two years ago. That's another story.)

But then I recall that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was from Indianapolis. Hi-ho!

So it's not quite as big a surprise, on further reflection, to discover a "magnificent victory monument for a rational outlook on life." The man who said "love may fail, but politeness will prevail" did not spring up from a vacuum.

His great-grandpa was Clemens Vonnegut.*

Perfect! Love may fail, but irony will also prevail.

==

*"We believe all that science teaches until it is superseded by new discoveries and knowledge...Our belief is built on reason, observation of nature, history and experience. We believe in the brotherhood of man...We believe in virtue, in perfectibility, in progress, in stability of laws of nature, in the necessity of improving the social condition and relations." Clemens Vonnegut (1890)

so it goes

The anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing is a good day to remember Kurt Vonnegut, whose first-hand experience of the fire-bombing of Dresden shaped his worldview and his fiction. Kindness is still in short supply.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

"Waking Life"

"I am a philosopher. (As Kurt Vonnegut writes in Timequake, 'I have to be.') I am not a spiritual thinker, much less a spiritualist or a religious advocate of any kind. But it seems to me, at least as a philosopher, that if spirituality means anything it means thoughtfulness... Spirituality, like philosophy, involves those questions that have no ultimate answers... [it] puts at arms' length all of the clever philosophy that scoffs at the big questions or reduces them to mere puzzles and paradoxes." Robert C. Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic

Vonnegut

"With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor..." (New York Times, 4.12.07)

Just as I prefer literary existentialism to the philosophical kind, the passing this week of Kurt Vonnegut reminds me that my disdain for philosophic pessimism does not extend to the sensibility behind "Slaughterhouse Five," "Breakfasts of Champions," "Cat's Cradle," et al. Philosophically I could never endorse Vonnegut's disgusted remark that "evolution can go to hell" if we're its product; but I know what he was saying, and it makes me smile. So does his next observation in A Man Without a Country, which leavens contempt for Mark Twain's "damned human race" with the acknowledgement that on evolution's time-scale we did just get here. (See Carl Sagan's "cosmic calendar".) We can cut ourselves a little slack, and a little hope.

Verlyn Klinkenborg: "The time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be... No one nourishes the skepticism of the young like Vonnegut. In his world, decency is likelier to be rooted in skepticism than it is in the ardor of faith." In mine too.