Sublime

He told us that one reason he and his friends wanted to start the commune and learn to “live off the land” in a simple way was that “we want to be the last people on earth.” Vonnegut said, “Isn’t that kind of a stuck-up kind of thing to want to be?” In the way he spoke and the way he wrote, Vonnegut was always coming up with the plain-spoken words

Eliot Rosewater.

“Vonnegut, in his fiction, is doing what the most serious writers always do. He is helping, in Joyce’s phrase, ‘to create the conscience of the race.’ What race? Human certainly, not American or German or any other abstraction from humanity. Just as pure romance provides us with necessary psychic exercise, intellectual comedy like Vonnegut’s

So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter to a group of high school students and assigned them this homework: Write a poem and don’t show it to anybody. Tear it up into little pieces and throw them into the trash can.

Bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down,