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I've been thinking about Kurt Vonnegut lately in my ongoing thinking about how to deal with the world. If he were still alive, he'd be be one person I'd think about writing a letter to. "How do you keep doing it?" That would be my basic question. How can the person who could write both "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater" and Slaughterhouse Five" keep having hope for the future, let alone keep writing?
But he said that we're here on Earth to "fart around," and to let no one tell you any different. Maybe that was his way of disconnecting like the hypothetical hermit I keep thinking of who is too invested in the world to interact with it. But he kept writing and did so in a way that feels to me like he hoped his words could mean something to people and to have some kind of effect on the world. That's the "it" I'd want to ask how he kept doing.
A couple of excerpts from an interview he did with Playboy in 1973 have been relevant to my thoughts on this.
and
But he said that we're here on Earth to "fart around," and to let no one tell you any different. Maybe that was his way of disconnecting like the hypothetical hermit I keep thinking of who is too invested in the world to interact with it. But he kept writing and did so in a way that feels to me like he hoped his words could mean something to people and to have some kind of effect on the world. That's the "it" I'd want to ask how he kept doing.
A couple of excerpts from an interview he did with Playboy in 1973 have been relevant to my thoughts on this.
I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.
As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their madeup tales.
And so on.
Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.
and
"I couldn't survive my own pessimism if I didn't have some kind of sunny little dream. … Human beings will be happier — not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie — but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia. That's what I want for me."