So It Goes

Note: I'm posting this for Amilynne, who has lost access to blogging at school. Let it be known I think she's the greatest.

Recently I have found myself irritated when people say they’re having a love affair with books, especially in reference to a tryst with a particular writer or genre, as in, “I’m currently having a love affair with Faulkner.” Not only do I find this trite, but rather cheap and inaccurate to boot. I’m fairly certain that the winter I spent a particular amount of time reading Mr. Nabokov’s novels, Mr. Hemingway and Mr. Garcia Marquez weren’t wracked with pangs of lover’s jealousy, and I made no point of hiding my affectation from them either--boldly I displayed Pale Fire on my bedside table, while Invitation to a Beheading plainly resided on the edge of my bathtub and Lolita rode openly with me to work and school, ready in the event that I wrangled a spare moment from my day. And when I made a point to read my Complete Works of William Shakespeare cover to cover, the Green-Eyed Monster veered not its ugly head when I spied a sweet-faced high school student grappling with Macbeth at the corner coffee house. On the contrary, I find that engaging in a tête-à-tête with a particular writer at a particular time leads not to the hurtful, surreptitious behaviors of an affair, but rather to generalized feelings of good faith and good will toward the human species. It’s more like that month you find yourself with a little extra money after all your bills are paid, so you end up giving several dollars to the quadriplegic veteran in the parking lot—you have something that brings warmth and comfort to your life, and you want to do what you can to ensure that everyone you encounter has something similar to turn to at the end of the day.

*****

That said, for lack of a handier platitude, I had my love affair with Kurt Vonnegut in the late summer of 2001. I had become acquainted with Vonnegut the year before when my roommate Blake loaned me his copies of Mother Night and The Sirens of Titan. (Blake also, incidentally, introduced me to Jhumpa Lahiri, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave, and for my part I introduced him to Sifl and Olly and underage drinking—it is a deficit I fear I will never pay off.) That summer my life was lacking; my semester out of college had somehow stretched to three years, and after being fired from Barnes & Noble I worked a string of crap jobs: Waitressing at IHOP, selling knives door-to-door, working internet technical support at a call center. I found respite from the void in my life at the local library. My appetite for literature was voracious, and after working my way through the alphabetized shelves I eventually wound up with a Vonnegut novel or two every week. Incidentally, I wouldn’t be half the person I am today had it not been for the idle hours of my early twenties spent meandering the shelves of the Idaho Falls Public Library.

In Cat’s Cradle, his novel on the meaningful meaninglessness of interconnected events and lives, Vonnegut warns against finding false significance in coincidental similarities, what he (or rather, Bokonon) calls a granfalloon. And yet I couldn’t help but feel the threads of Vonnegut’s novels—incidents, characters, philosophies, Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum-- intertwining with my own life, whether as part of the cosmic scheme of things or the Law of Attraction or a granfalloon or what have you. And so it was, on the morning of September 11, when the Twin Towers fell under attack while I was halfway through reading Deadeye Dick, it seemed to me a completely foreseeable, if not comprehendible, turn of events, as saturated as my mind was with Vonnegut’s world. I do not mean to imply that that day was not a tragedy, nor that I (or Vonnegut for that matter) was an insufferable cynic in the face of such massive loss of life. Merely, I wish to state that my understanding of that watershed day in American history--and all the facets of its political and cultural resonance, from the so-called “War on Terror” to the subsequent War in Iraq to the growing divide between liberals, moderates, and conservatives to that God-awful painting of the bald eagle shedding a tear as he overlooks the destruction of the Twin Towers--was unquestionably shaped by Kurt Vonnegut, for which I am eternally grateful. When people ask me where I was on September Eleventh, I can in all truth answer that I was with Rudy Waltz, pointing a Springfield rifle out the cupola window of his Midland City home.

*****

Kurt Vonnegut’s influence profoundly intertwined with my life for a second time this past week. After dealing with a Nineteenth-Century-heavy curriculum for most of the year, I’ve finally succeeded in bringing my junior English classes up to Twentieth Century American Lit, and after long consideration of which novels to include, I settled on teaching Cat’s Cradle in the hope that it will prove to be a refreshing palate cleanser as we come to the end of the semester. I began re-reading the book last week and, as I always do when creating a new literature unit, was on the lookout for supplementary material to round out my lessons, when on Thursday morning I tuned in to NPR halfway through a story on Vonnegut. At first I thought how fortuitous it was that Vonnegut was in the news just as I was preparing to teach his novel, but then I picked up on the realization that the anchor was referring to him in the past tense. My worst suspicions were founded; Kurt Vonnegut had died the evening before. I have found it difficult to express how saddened I am by his death without sounding overly sentimental, or worse, downright sappy. I wouldn’t know if this is how it feels to lose an old friend or loved one, as I have been lucky enough in my adult life not to have been through that experience. Suffice it to say that, when I entered my classroom on Thursday morning after hearing the announcement of Vonnegut’s death, and I saw the piled copies of Cat’s Cradle where I had left them the day before, in my heart I mourned for the loss of my mentor, the Postmodern prophet. Kurt Vonnegut was a great mind; he was one of us.

And I am still eternally grateful.