Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday.
NYTimes obituaryVonnegut was one of the few authors who enjoyed a decent amount of real estate on my parents' bookshelf. Don't get me wrong, my parents had a large collection of books, it's just that the collection was comprised of many varied authors, most of whom did not have repeat appearances. I can remember being about 10 years old, sitting in our basement on the brown and orange shag carpeting, looking at all the titles written by the same person. At least two of the paperbacks had color-rimmed pages. "Slaughterhouse-Five" was turquoise-green and I think "Cat's Cradle" was red. I'm not sure if this practice of colored pages was en vogue in the book production world in the 60s and 70s or if it was just a Vonnegut thing. Regardless, it was attention-getting. So were the titles themselves. "Deadeye Dick," "Player Piano," "Welcome To The Monkey House," "Slapstick," "Galapagos." Think about it. Isn't "Galapagos" a really interesting word?
I read "Slaughterhouse-Five" in early high school. For fun, mind you, not as assigned reading. I know that I couldn't possibly have gotten as much out of reading it as I would do now, so it's one of those books that I should go back and re-read. As it stands now, I have two distinct memories from that book - the first is not worth mentioning. The second would be the repeated phrase "so it goes," as in the following passage from "Slaughterhouse-Five":
"Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes. Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes."
I give that example to provide the context of the phrase's function within "Slaughterhouse-Five," which was to take emotionally loaded situations (deaths) and reduce them to the barest of factual utterances, equivalent to "it happened, it is." It's understatement to the point of anaesthesia, very bleak and but somehow humorous at the same time. My dad, who had read so many of Vonnegut's novels, would often say "so it goes" (albeit normally in acknowledgment of events somewhat less monumental than death, though still negative) and so this formed something of my sense of the world and how to cope. Some things happen and you can get lost in the pain, but strip all of the emotional connotations and feelings away and you are left with a simple fact, a simply stated event, like saying something as neutral as "he's eating dinner." Emotional tides are more difficult to handle on a daily basis, whereas you can learn to co-exist with a fact.
The present tense of the phrase "so it goes" also helps because it implies that not only did this one event happen, but other events will happen and continue to happen. There is some forward progress implied, even if the events that will happen may continue to be of a negative nature. I suppose it's a more palatable way of saying "life goes on," which is a phrase that I can't stand. I think "so it goes" somberly acknowledges the negative nature of many of life's events. I suppose it could be taken to be flip or superficial, but knowing the context of the events that Vonnegut applied the phrase to (e.g. Kennedy and King's quick-succession assassinations) allows the reader to know it is not meant superficially. It is merely meant as a grave acknowledgment of perpetual sadness combined with the lightening effect of compressing all that sadness into one small event. Sort of like an emotional clown car.
Vonnegut's death weighs heavily on me, I think most likely because his sense of humor always reminded me of my dad's and he was someone my dad admired. I'll just leave off with a couple of quotes of Vonnegut's.
First, the fact that Vonnegut was a vocal religious skeptic adds some poignancy here:
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: 'The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.'" -- from "A Man Without A Country"
And last, keeping in mind that Vonnegut's mother killed herself and that he was an American POW encamped in Dresden during the firebombing so I believe this is to be taken ironically...wistfully at best:
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." (written on a picture of a headstone drawn by Vonnegut that appears in "Slaughterhouse-Five")
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