I spent five hours of today reading Kurt Vonnegut's final book, Armageddon in Retrospect. Just over 230 pages.

I recommend it.

The subtitle is "And Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace," which is true. The writings range from the letter he wrote to his family as a freshly-released prisoner of war to a speech he would have given if he had not died sixteen days before the scheduled date. Most of the pieces involve war in some way, most of those involve World War II, and most of those are short stories.

The book takes its title from its last item, a 23-page short story about an averted Armageddon. The story mostly takes place, Iiii shit you not, in the real-world town of Verdigris, Oklahoma. I have updated the town's Wikipedia page accordingly.

The book's introduction was written by Kurt's son Mark, a pediatrician and decent writer in his own right.

I will be quoting from it and from the aforementioned final speech. Do not think the lines I quote are the only interesting ones. Do not.

Those two parts were worth the price of the book to me. They revealed something interesting, though this isn't in the parts I quote: Kurt Vonnegut had to try hard to be a pessimist, to be gloomy, until the Iraq War made him genuinely so. He tried to "get things right," even if getting things right didn't solve a thing, and he felt that he had to be a cloudy pessimist to do so.

What the hell. It worked.



(From the intro):

He often said that he had to be a writer because he wasn't good at anything else. He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950s, he was employed by Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that had jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and walked out, self-employed again.

...

The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service.

...

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to people when they read Kurt is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.

---

(From At Clowes Hall, Indianapolis, April 27, 2007):

Listen: I studied anthropology at the University of Chicago after the Second World War, the last one we ever won. And the physical anthropologists, who had studied human skulls going back thousands of years, said we were only supposed to live for thirty-five years or so, because that's how long our teeth lasted without modern dentistry.

Weren't those the good old days: thirty-five years and we were out of here. Talk about intelligent design! Now all the Baby Boomers who can afford dentistry and health insurance, poor bastards, are going to live to be a hundred!

Maybe we should outlaw dentistry. And maybe doctors should quit curing pneumonia, which used to be called "the old people's friend."

...

This is indeed the Apocalypse, the end of everything, as prophesied by Saint John the Divine and Saint Kurt the Vonnegut.

Even as I speak, the very last polar bear may be dying of hunger on account of climate change, on account of us. And I sure will miss the polar bears. Their babies are so warm and cuddly and trusting, just like ours.

Does this old poop have any advice for young people in times of such awful trouble? Well, I'm sure you know that our country is the only so-called advanced nation that still has a death penalty. And torture chambers. I mean, why screw around?

But listen: If anyone here should wind up on a gurney in a lethal-injection facility, maybe the one at Terre Haute, here is what your last words should be: "This will certainly teach me a lesson."

If Jesus were alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time. His ideas are just too liberal.

...

[And here's where I started crying. I'll let you guess why.]

But let me tell you: I would not be standing before you tonight if it hadn't been for the example of the life and works of Booth Tarkington, a native of this city. During his time, 1869 to 1946, which overlapped my own time for twenty-four years, Booth Tarkington became a beautifully successful and respected writer of plays, novels, and short stories. His nickname in the literary world, one I would give anything to have, was "The Gentlemen from Indiana."

When I was a kid, I wanted to be like him.

We never met. I wouldn't have known what to say. I would have been gaga with hero worship.

...

The very best thing you can be in life is a teacher, provided that you are crazy in love with what you teach, and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel like one.

...

I asked Mark a while back what life was all about, since I didn't have a clue. He said, "Dad, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." Whatever it is.

"Whatever it is." Not bad. That one could be a keeper.

And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don't already have one.

I myself just got a dog, and it's a new crossbreed. It's half French poodle and half Chinese shih tzu.

It's a shit-poo.

And I thank you for your attention, and I'm out of here.