Such is today, for me. Kurt Vonnegut has died. This makes me feel sad.
As a young teenager I loved to read. Especially, I consumed the works of the Romantic Poets, JRR Tolkein, CS Lewis (the Perelandra Trilogy, not that lame Narnia stuff) Mervyn Peake and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Visionary prose was a favorite hiding place for my sensitive, literary soul in the late sixties and early seventies. The kids at school were sadistic and vicious, mostly, but I happened to cross paths with two other outcasts, a pair of kindred bookish geeks, the Kafka sisters.
They urged me to read Vonnegut. "Welcome to the Monkey House", "Harrison Bergeron", "Cat's Cradle", "The Sirens of Titan", "Mother Night" and of course the world famous "Slaughterhouse Five" were sought out at the town library, their contents sucked up and directly woven into my impressionable wiring.
I can still imagine myself caught up in a chronosynclasticinfindibulum. The Bull Mastiff hound, perpetually at Billy Pilgrim's side, still wags his stub while thinking dog thoughts outloud in Rumford, Rhode Island.
Unc and Boaz up there in space. The high pitched sounds of the "Sirens", the gaseous vistas of Tralfamador....Ice Nine...The Hoenniker family and Kilgore Trout....A "leak" is a mirror! Harrison Bergeron performing ballet while weighted down to "handicap" him sufficiently for a dumned down, lazy and unskilled popular audience...
These were big, phrophetic ideas expressed with humor, intelligence and incredible resources of imagination.
Perhaps the saddest fact of Vonnegut's demise at 86 is that it was the result of a fall which injured his magnificent brain. I can read no irony or glib phrophecy into this. It's just plain sad.
The finest fiction writer of the twentieth century is dead.
