I know this is a few days past its prime, but it has taken me this long to digest the loss of one of our great artists and thinkers. I'm not even sure how interesting it will be, but I feel the urge to contribute to the nationwide eulogy for Kurt Vonnegut. Apologies to those diaries that have come before...
Back when I was in my early semesters studying music at Columbia College, a time where I had finished my transition from a desire to be a rock musician and focus on orchestral music and film scoring, I began work on the Overture for what I envisioned was to be my first, great opera. The work was going to be an epic, Wagnerian piece about fraternity in the face of betrayal and hope in the face of abandonment. All I needed was for someone to write the libretto - someone to adapt the source material, a novel, I had chosen. The novel? "The Sirens of Titan" by the recently late and forever great Kurt Vonnegut.
I was introduced to his writing in high school, one of the few things that has stuck with me from my teenage academic pursuits, if you can call them that. Mr. McMillan, in my junior year English class made us read Vonnegut's "Cat's Crade", a book that I enjoyed very much. I sought out other works by Vonnegut after that, and ulitmately ended up at the Park Forest librairy surplus sale. They had lots of those early Saturday morning sales back then, and my mother was more than willing to take me along. She always wanted to see me develop a passion for reading and used to pick books for me in the hopes that they might spark something. On that day, though, I needed no prompting. You see, I had told my mom that I had read and really liked "Cat's Cradle", and I was also pleased that she knew exactly who this Kurt Vonnegut guy was. We sought his work out at that librairy sale and hit paydirt.
We found three of his books there that day. My mom was quick to tell me that one of the three, "Slaughterhouse Five" was one of the most famous books of the 20th century and that it was all about the author's World War II experiences. The second of the three was a collection of short stories called "Welcome to the Monkey House", and the thrid was "The Sirens of Titan" which I though was one of the coolest titles I'd ever heard.
Later that same morning I settled onto the couch and began to read. Enthralled, I read almost half the book by the time dinner rolled around. I finished the book by dinnertime the next day, deeply moved and uplifted by what I had read. When I told my mom how much the book had affected me, she said; "Yes, 'Slaughterhouse Five' is an amazing book!". She was surprised when I told her that I had not even started that one, but instead, had devoured "The Sirens of Titan". By the time I entered college, I had read everything Kurt Vonnegut still had in print - and wanted more...
For the next 20 years, Kurt Vonnegut's writings were a part of my life, and I always looked to a new book by him to be akin to the return of an old friend. He passed away this week, having left us all a very powerful and thoughtful legacy which was always sprinkled liberally throughout with laughter and inspiration. I never went any further with the opera. Never got past the Overture. Thankfully, even that is now lost, thanks to computer obsolesence and back-up negligence. I say "thankfully" because what I wrote at age 20 wasn't even close to living up to the promise of the ideas that "The Sirens of Titan" stirred in me. Maybe someday I will revisit the opera and write something worthy of the novel, but somehow, I don't think it is possible.
So goodbye Mr. Vonnegut. Isn't it strange that even going at age 81 seems like much too soon? So it goes...