RIP Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

You know that one book that you read as a teenager and it changed the whole way you looked at the world in the deep and fundamental way that only an adolescent can feel? For me that book was A Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I picked it up off a cute boy I kinda of liked in my church youth group, and mostly started reading it because he was kind of an existencial stoner and thought the book was really deep. I wanted him to think I was really deep, ergo, the book. But I started reading it at a point in my life when I was struggling with my faith and didn't know what I believed, and as I read about the gentle followers of Bokonon, and the gospel that all was unknownable, except for human kindness, I felt like KV had entered a door in my brain, sat down, and started typing about the decor. It was amazing. He articulated for me what I believed, before I knew that was what I believed. And for that, I was and will be eternally grateful.

For those of you who don't know, KV died on Wednesday, and with his death, as Jon Stewart put it, the world is "a little grayer, and a little less interesting". It's an odd feeling knowing that your favorite author, responsible for being the literary articulation of so much that you consider you, is no longer alive. That he will no longer create, that his copious canon is finite and now complete, save finding any random unfinished manuscripts. I never got to meet him, although I had a couple of close calls, but in some ways I felt that I already had met him, through his books. That's true of most authors, but more true of Kurt Vonnegut. He was unabashedly autobiographical in his books, and his brutal honesty about himself and those around him was both endearing and jarring at the same time. His was a love-hate relationship with the human race: love because of their infinite potential, and hate because they so often fall short of the mark. Much like my own opinion of people as a whole, KV believed that people were capable of greatness; whether it was great evil or great good was a personal choice. He did it all with an awkward grace that any human being can recognize as their own, and a dark humor that was as funny as it was sad.

I would quote some here, but in the way of all good books, I have shared them and in the process lost many of them. When I broke up with my ex-boyfriend the only thing I regretted was that the piece of shit never gave me back a dogeared and threadbare copy of some of Kurt vonnegut's collected works. I would quote A Cat's Cradle here, but it has been torn to pieces by a small dog named Vader that belongs to my friend Ali. The point is that quotes aren't going to convey to you why his work was so important to me, because you aren't reading them from inside my head. Kurt Vonnegut's words might ring hollow to you, and that's ok. He would be ok with that, because it would prove his assertion that all great truths are lies, and individuals, not universals, are the saving grace of humanity. Vonnegut was a humanist, and did not believe in God. What he believed in was people, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. He taught me something that seems depressing at first, but isn't the more you think about it: people will always disappoint you, so you have to find other things to love them for besides living up to expectations.

In his last book, A Man Without a Country, which made me laugh, and cry, and mourn for him because it was clearly a goodbye letter, he created a series of sketches that were epitaphs. It takes a sick and lovely mind to create a list of the things to put on your own tombstone, especially when standing so near the threshold of death. I don't know what the epitaph will end up being, but the only bright spot in the tragedy of this loss is knowing that there will be at least one last thing of Vonnegut's left to read, and I can guarantee you that it will be a surprise, a delight, and a devastation.