today humanity lost one of its great contributers. mr. kurt vonnegut was not a man to stay inside lines. he challenged. pushed boundaries. pissed people off. but he was right on in his thinking and diagnosing of society. so much so that it scares me a little. i read his memoirs this summer, and i was totally blown away. it came at just the right time in my life too. i found it exciting that i could connect with someone who thought about a lot of the things that i did. even though our connection was just through words and scribbles on a page, it was a profound one for me. when i think of people like him, it gives me an ounce of hope for society. maybe we're not completely doomed. i'll leave you with some of his thoughts that i've collected here and there cause he says things a lot better than i ever could...
"Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone."
"I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours."
"I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke."
"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."
"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."
thank you for who you were and are.
1 comment:
I would very much like to read about him, he seems like he was incredible man, who punched holes in the status quo.
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