Run the tape back to when I was 9 or 10 and I found an old copy of Breakfast of Champions in a box in our garage as my dad and I were in the process of throwing out old shit. Mixed in with other paperbacks, I was going through each one to try and put off actually doing work for as long as possible.
When I asked my dad about it, he was actually a little happy to see what I'd pulled out of the stack. Instead of telling me about Champions - or to get my ass back to work -he told me a quick story about Welcome to the Monkey House and how it was a book he'd buy and loan out and then buy again.This was a big thing to me as a kid, because I never really saw my dad read a book cover to cover. He'd read periodicals every night - I have scarring memories of the "birds and the bees talk" involving a clipping from some magazine about puberty coming at an earlier age because of a cocktail of factors in the modern world - but never books. To hear that Vonnegut was an author my dad would read and re-read was nothing short of monumental in the eyes of a kid.
I stashed Champions away until that evening and then started reading, barely putting the book down until I'd finished it. This isn't something I'll normally do, as I hit a wall around the 75 percent mark and still have a backlog of nearly finished books. But with Champions, I just kept powering through, utterly fascinated by the novel.
To say it did nothing short of changing my (limited) world view isn't doing it justice. Dirty jokes and scribbled illustrations, crazy insights and non-linear storytelling, it was a book that had that 1982 Apple commercial impact on me.
Miles away from the usual fourth-grade fare that was required reading in school, this book had a strong underground feel and made me start questioning the education I was being given versus the one I thought I should expect and seek out if it wasn't provided to me.
From there, I grabbed as many of Vonnegut's books as I could and continued to be amazed by him on different levels as I saw more of the world and began writing myself - It was genius to use storylines from an author in the story to float ideas that wouldn't necessarily stand on their own - and always carried a healthy respect for him as an author. Looking around the blogosphere, I'm not the only one to feel the impact.
Still, it wasn't a big shock that he passed, but it was a problem for me all week. Despite his wit, wisdom and utter chaos that came across on the pages, I couldn't help but feel that we've all lost something very important.
So, with a little time to reflect and do the requisite searching tonight, I think the best way to sum it all up comes from Slaughterhouse Five which, if you're literate and haven't read yet, is a major disservice to the universe. (Just as a quick point of reference, Tralfamadore is an alien planet where the narrator is being kept.)
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.
The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.
Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."
Not for nothing, but when I e-mailed my dad to ask if he'd seen Vonnegut had died, the return e-mail boiled down to, "No... but so it goes."
(Image from Albion.edu)
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