“You know what the truth is? It’s some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me and I say ‘Yeah, yeah—ain’t it the truth?”’ - Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Kurt Vonnegut made me fall in love with writing. Not alone, but he was one of the three.
It started with Douglas Coupland, whose book Life After God I happened upon in the White Oaks Secondary School Library in Oakville. Life After God had a great cover. That's why I read it.
I liked that book so much I found information about Coupland, and learned that he loved and was influenced by the works of Kurt Vonnegut, a great American satirist.
I went on to read Vonnegut.
And, just as I was when I read Coupland, I was amazed.
I remember thinking, "Wow, people are allowed to write like that?"
It was a revelation.
Writers are allowed to be funny and dismissive and confrontational and, provided they don't do it for its own sake, extremely offensive.
That's what reading Vonnegut taught me, and it's what I wanted to be taught, so I read exclusively Vonnegut for an entire year.
People generally like writers who confirm, or authenticate, their own prejudices.
Vonnegut did that for a lot of people who were suspicious of social hierarchy, of undeserved respect, of pride in self and country.
It was only two years ago when he was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was as if Vonnegut was officially passing the torch to Stewart. It was a torch passed to Vonnegut from Mark Twain.
This is from Vonnegut's interview with Stewart:
"I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy—because we’re experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that’s what’s going on now."
Everything he wrote was like that. All his answers in interviews were like that.
The things he said are the things they don't teach you in school.
And teachers probably shouldn't teach them in school, because if everyone knew what Vonnegut taught, schools would be empty, and libraries and blues clubs full.
Here are two more quotations to end on.
First, from an essay he wrote called Knowing What's Nice.
"And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
Worth remembering.
Finally, here's what he asked, in a Sunday Herald article he wrote, be written on his tombstone.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC."