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It is embarrassing to any 21st-century writer, I suspect, to learn that any of their fans ever, ever liked Kurt Vonnegut. But though our actual reading of Vonnegut was limited to Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five (both of which were discussed in Emory University doctoral seminars), he fitted right in with the philosophical topics of pre-poststructuralist academia. We navigated by heuristic fictions (the philosophy of “as if,” whoever the dickens the forgotten philosopher was who wrote that long-ago book), and by crude but justified suspicion of governmental motives, and by golly, ol’ Kurt made sense in that mental universe even as we bemoaned his abilities as a prose stylist and creator of plot complexities. But as a diametrically opposed thinker wrote (I paraphrase from memory) in a roughly contemporaneous novel, “He [the protagonist] was increasingly possessed by the sense that life was farcical. On the one hand, this was a symptom of his defective thinking and incipient mental illness. On the other hand, life was indeed farcical.”
Over the past week, I found myself, as a symptom of my own depression, thinking that this blog had come to resemble Bokononism (which I hadn’t thought of in decades, literally) in its assertion that its assertions should not be trusted or taken literally, even when they happened to be trustworthy and literal.
I realized this morning how much some of my other ponderous conclusions about comprehension and cultural incapacities resembled the gulf between Billy Pilgrim and his alien captors, who perceive time as a geometric pattern. As Vonnegut put it in his incomparably bright vulgarity, the whatever they were called saw an individual life as a very complex series of moves by an organism, and though at the one end of the line the organism wasn’t doing all that well, there were lots of other places in which the organism was getting along just fine.
Paul Tillich used to astound undergraduate questioners by showing how their inarticulate, simplistic question actually raised the deepest philosophical issues of the past five centuries. Vonnegut, by contrast, expressed the less noticed and understood philosophical issues of the past five centuries in terms that sounded like they had been created by an inarticulate adolescent.
And indeed, the destruction of Dresden became a topic of confused conversation in recent years in terms that sometimes made Billy Pilgrim’s silly unstuckness in time seem clarity itself by comparison.
And while I am at it, I had originally intended to post a notation that since my recent unposted (or private) posts seemed to be getting less and less interesting (never mind the public ones) I may inflict fewer public or even friends-only ones on you.
If it seems appropriate I may ask an occasional question about showing up at a certain pub on a certain day. Otherwise I'll try to avoid cluttering your inbox.
Over the past week, I found myself, as a symptom of my own depression, thinking that this blog had come to resemble Bokononism (which I hadn’t thought of in decades, literally) in its assertion that its assertions should not be trusted or taken literally, even when they happened to be trustworthy and literal.
I realized this morning how much some of my other ponderous conclusions about comprehension and cultural incapacities resembled the gulf between Billy Pilgrim and his alien captors, who perceive time as a geometric pattern. As Vonnegut put it in his incomparably bright vulgarity, the whatever they were called saw an individual life as a very complex series of moves by an organism, and though at the one end of the line the organism wasn’t doing all that well, there were lots of other places in which the organism was getting along just fine.
Paul Tillich used to astound undergraduate questioners by showing how their inarticulate, simplistic question actually raised the deepest philosophical issues of the past five centuries. Vonnegut, by contrast, expressed the less noticed and understood philosophical issues of the past five centuries in terms that sounded like they had been created by an inarticulate adolescent.
And indeed, the destruction of Dresden became a topic of confused conversation in recent years in terms that sometimes made Billy Pilgrim’s silly unstuckness in time seem clarity itself by comparison.
And while I am at it, I had originally intended to post a notation that since my recent unposted (or private) posts seemed to be getting less and less interesting (never mind the public ones) I may inflict fewer public or even friends-only ones on you.
If it seems appropriate I may ask an occasional question about showing up at a certain pub on a certain day. Otherwise I'll try to avoid cluttering your inbox.
