'So it goes': A eulogy for Vonnegut

Not many people witness the end of the world and keep on living. It's a crock, really. If a man sees the earth go under in a wind of flames and smells the stench of innocent people cooking-screaming-and then afterwards is told to toss the dead onto funeral pyres, well, life never looks the same. Right? I mean, what heartless soul could see the end, whistle, put his hands in his pockets and walk away?

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. witnessed the end of the world during the fire-bombing in Dresden, Germany during the waning days of World War II. He survived because he was locked underground in a meat locker making vitamin supplements with his fellow prisoners of war. He never walked away, and the bombing was the inspiration for his best-known (and perhaps most powerful) novel: Slaughterhouse-Five.

Vonnegut, however, survives no longer.

Listen: Kurt Vonnegut died April 11th in Manhattan after he suffered severe injuries to his brain due to a fall weeks before. Author of 14 novels, along with many shorter works, Vonnegut used science fiction and wild flights of imagination to put forth his message.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, his protagonist Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time," and floats from one life experience to the other. He sees his birth and death several times over, and even lands back behind enemy lines in World War II.

In Cat's Cradle, his narrator travels to a far off country and learns of Bokononism, a circular religion begun by the prophet Bokonon who promises at the beginning of his sacred text that "all the truths I'm about to tell you are shameless lies."

Vonnegut's work was also autobiographical, and drew on elements of his own upbringing. Born in Indianapolis, Ind. in 1922, Vonnegut eventually attended Cornell University and the Carnegie Institute of Technology. His mother committed suicide in 1944 (so it goes), and Vonnegut himself attempted it forty years later.

In a Rolling Stone profile published last year, Vonnegut mulled the possibility of suing Pall Mall cigarettes (which he chain-smoked) for failing to follow through with their promise to kill him. In the end, however, he died with his second wife Jill Krementz at his bed-side.

His death leaves a gaping void in the world of literature and the world in general. And even though, toward the end of his life, he lamented the human race's slow murder of Earth, he had to know, somewhere under his Mark-Twain curls, that his books went to long way in opening our murderous eyes. One of Bokonon's songs best sums up his legacy:

"I wanted all things

To seem to make some sense,

So we all could be happy, yes,

Instead of tense.

And I made up lies

So that they all fit nice,

And I made this sad world

A Par-a-dise."