Vonnegut

A friend of mine lent me the latest Kurt Vonnegut book, "A Man Without a Country." It's not a novel, and it's not quite essays, and it's not quite memoir. It's selected reflections on life and the world. It's a blog in book form.

I found this passage to be particularly inspirational:

If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

The friend who gave me this book made a good point about Vonnegut. She said that Vonnegut is a writer who doesn't use a lot of hard words; instead, he puts easy words together in a really smart and interesting way.

I'm trying really hard to suppress my compulsion to go and dig up a lot of biographical details about Vonnegut. I know he went to Cornell, and I know that he fought in World War II and was a prisoner of war in Dresden when the British fire-bombed the city. I'm starting to wonder whether it takes a significant trauma to successfully wrench one's authorial voice out of oneself. My most significant trauma to date has been, well, being indecisive about my future.