SO IT GOES

Dear Spike:

The first time I can recall being deeply saddened by the death of someone I did not know was in the summer of 2001, when the great bluesman Johnny Lee Hooker died.

Even though I had only just recently become captivated by Hooker’s music, and even though I had not yet been through his more than 100-album canon, it struck me as calamitous that the world would have to settle for what Johnny Lee had already written.

Two years later, I remember mourning over the loss of Frederick McFeely Rogers — a man my entire generation came to know simply as Mr. Rogers. At the time that he died, I had not watched his television program for many, many years. And yet I could still sing along with every song — and still can today.

Kurt Vonnegut’s death this week at the age of 84 was saddening for me in several similar ways.

Like Hooker, Vonnegut lived such a rich and prolific life — leaving the world with a vast collection of novels, short stories, essays and speeches — that fan of his work though I am, it is unlikely I’ll ever fully exhaust it. And like Mr. Rogers, his work will continue to echo through my soul.

My relationship with Vonnegut was a long and intricate affair. I was introduced to his work, as many millions of American readers have been, (and as I imagine you will be,) in high school with the assigned reading of Slaughterhouse Five. Smitten though I was at the time, I did not actually fall in love with Vonnegut’s words until a few years later, when I came upon the short novel Mother Night.

For me, each page of Night was a vaguely drawn treasure map — a starting point for an expedition, through my own mind, that sometimes had little to do with the experiences of the characters in the story. It’s been 10 years since I first read that novel. I can think of no work of fiction that has more greatly informed my life.

At some point, I became familiar with Vonnegut as a humanist and peace activist. Not the sign-carrying, drum-beating, chant-calling sort, but rather the rarer sort that looks deeply into the nature of man and ponders — aloud, so that others might ponder too — whether there isn’t a better way than war.

To that end, Vonnegut was fond of repeating the most famous words of the American socialist leader and peace activist Eugene Debs:

While there is a lower class, I am in it.
And while there is a criminal element, I am of it.
And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

In the final years of his life, Vonnegut often lamented that many of his fellow Americans had lost the ability to do anything more than scoff at such sentiments — as if the very notion of a world without prisons was so preposterous that it was utterly pointless to even begin a rhetorical discussion there.

So it goes.

There was a time, not so long ago, it would have been preposterous to believe that the illiterate son of a Mississippi sharecropper could become one of the most influential musicians in American history.

And there was a time, not so long ago, it would have been preposterous to believe that a shy puppeteer and musician from rural Pennsylvania would almost single-handedly turn the most powerful tool ever devised for selling breakfast cereal and action figures to children into the most powerful tool ever devised to nurture and inform their lives.

When you dream, my child, let preposterousness be the sand in your eyes.

Love,
dad