Commentary Too - April 12, 2007 - Printable Version
- God Bless You, Kurt Vonnegut
by Mark Faulk So here I am, sitting here crying about the passing of an 84-year old man who I never met, unless of course you can call sitting in an audience along with 6,000 other Vonnegut fanatics hanging on his every word meeting him. I like to imagine that he was speaking to me that day way back in 2003, that he was saying…”Mark (he calls me Mark because we’re such good friends), I appreciate that you’ve been there for me almost from the start, and that you credit me with whatever minutia of talent that you might possess as a writer, but stop taking yourself so damn seriously and just write.”
Damn…I’m still crying, I don’t even know what to say here. Kurt Vonnegut was…is…my hero. Without him I wouldn’t be an obscure aspiring writer who is getting ready to publish my first book. Hell, without him it’s quite possible I wouldn’t have even survived my teenage years. His words sustained me through the darkest hours of my life, I found comfort in his world when mine seemed to abandon me. I first read Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, at the age of thirteen…and it was as if I realized at that exact moment that the Universe was truly infinite. No hallucinogen could ever expand my thinking to that degree, no mere physical rush could compare to the almost religious experience of reading Vonnegut. He was the first writer who was one of us, whose ideas reached into our collective psyches and traversed uncharted territories, opening up doors to metaphorical rooms that we didn’t even know existed.
I read every damn book he ever wrote…not just every damn book, every damn word, Essays, short stories, speeches, interviews, anyeffingthing I could find by him, about him, and when I couldn’t find anything new, I went back and reread my favorites, over and over. I emulated his style in my own primitive homage to the greatest writer who ever lived, even stealing his catchphrases and tweaking them just slightly in an attempt to make them my own. I just now pulled Slaughterhouse-Five off of my Vonnegut Shelf (yes, Vonnegut has his own section in my bookshelf…what?) and looked the opening line, which is “All of this happened, more or less,” and it made me cry again.
There’s no point in my going over his accomplishments, or listing off his fourteen books, or his countless essays, short stories, speeches, or interviews. If you love Vonnegut like I do, you already know all that…if you don’t, then you don’t deserve to know. He is our national treasure, I’ve said it a hundred times. He changed us all, he was a secret we all shared, an inside joke that only those who are enlightened got.
I have a Vonnegut poster on my wall at work that my daughter gave me, and a signed, numbered Vonnegut silkscreen that I look at every time I sit down to write. I try my best to channel his energy into my writing, I hope that someday I’ll become one one-hundredth the writer that he was. It’s hard to say goodbye to someone who changed your life, so I’ll just let keep his words flowing through my heart and soul, and say this instead:
God Bless you, Kurt Vonnegut…and thank you for everything.
Here's a Kurt Vonnegut-laced article that I wrote a couple of years ago:
"The Secret Vonnegut Society" or "Subversion as an Art Form"
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