Kurt is somewhere up in heaven having a blast right now. What he did was more than write; what he did was--through all the words and sentences he strung together--to define what it is to be human. It took him his whole life, but through his stories and novels a reader can begin to conceptualize what it is to be human. I have yet to encounter any author who has been able to so clearly and concisely tackle the subject of being alive. All of life's little ironies and contradictions are innumerable, and yet, Kurt was able to see many of these and through his clunky old typewriter help anyone who happened to read what he wrote to begin to conceive just exactly why they were here on this great earth.
I know it is such a great terrible tragedy to be "po-mo" but I offer you this little piece of advice and hope that you take it, no matter how hipster it may seem: read anything by Kurt Vonnegut, it will make you feel so much better about being a human being.
In the process of defining what it is to be human, Kurt achieves one of his greatest accomplishments--or at least what I will consider his greatest accomplishment. You see, through Kurt's writing he relishes what it is to be a person in this world and breaks down to the very core our existence in this modern era. We no longer live in the world of Shakespeare or Aristotle; we live in the world of Vonnegut. This new world we have invented for ourselves seems ever more difficult for us to find a place in it and though this great author clearly views our present human condition with disdain, make no mistake that his sympathy is with us.
His legacy will live forever as the man who has helped a whole new era of people discover themselves and their place in this world; and he made us laugh the whole way through.
Thank you Kurt.
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