My selfish emotion is in response to the death of my hero. It was one of my cherished dreams to meet him someday just so he could tell me I didn't know anything. He chain smoked for decades and died because of brain injuries from falling. It's an ironic death that I think he would have appreciated. I ought to say something personal about how I am a better person for reading his work and have a better understanding of my relation to humanity and the world, but I don't think he ever wanted people to be like him. Sometimes I feel like I think he must have that life would be better if we couldn't recognize just how wrong things are. "Life is no way to treat an animal," as it were. And because it's what he would want to be said about him:
Kurt Vonnegut is up in heaven now.
So it goes.
3 comments:
Death through suffering IS sad.
But you are so right. Life is so much more sad and tragic and heart wrenching than death, I am so glad I read this entry. I try to make points like this across to other people, but they always toss my explanations aside and say they do not understand me and that sometimes I am more cynical and emotionally detached than I am humane. Can't you be a good person but still be a realist and someone who can separate raw emotion from reality and be skeptical and critical about our world?
Then again, I don't know about you, but if someone I really cared about (one of the few) dropped down dead, I would lose grasp of all senses and cry until my eyes shrunk.
Death is so perplexing to me, I mean the way people choose to honor the dead... or not...I hate when someone lives their whole life actually trying to make a point and then once they're dead people go and deal with it in a way that would make the deceased sad or disgusted.
But at least you are thinking about what HE would've wanted, so often that part is so quickly forgotten.
Anonymous-san
It's really hard to engage someone in a meaningful conversation about death. No one really seems to want to talk about it. It becomes an almost shameful topic. I think that's really unfortunate. I guess that comes from living far longer than evolution naturally equipped us for. Death is always "over there" and rarely within the personal scope.
I'm sure that he would think all of his fans are being silly. He was a very realistic man and surprised he lived as long as he did. I overheard some girls talking about him, but they had no idea who he was (the author of Fahrenheit 451, they thought). I usually write that kind of stuff off as people being ignorant, but this got to me. A great man and literary icon like Kurt Vonnegut dies, and he's treated with disdain like someone that no one knows. Yet, when Anna Nicole Smith dies, the American public and media crap out their eyes in response. There are only so many ways you can say, "Misplaced priorities."
But Anna Nicole Smith was able to bring revenue to the media when they reported on all the stupid things she did. Since Kurt Vonnegut didn't do stupid things the news couldn't report about him, and since this society is so based around media and entertainment that doesn't require effort and literacy Anna Nicole Smith was more important to society.
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