Bye, Bye Kurt...So it goes...

I received a text message from my best buddy, Karen, informing that Kurt Vonnegut died at 84. We lost a literary hero. With books like Breakfast of the Champions, Slaugtherhouse –Five, and others, Vonnegut’s writings made our College days tolerable; satiated our hunger for real literary experience. I remember the time when I borrowed Breakfast of the Champions in the library; the book was old since it was still published in 1973 but when I read the first few pages, I became an instant Vonnegut-convert. Karen and I cannot get enough of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout’s characters. For a week or so, we think, write, and feel like Kilgore Trout, sketching anything we can think of in my “green book”, like Trout’s girl’s underpants. With lines like “If you want to hurt your parents but don’t have the guts to be a homosexual, go to the arts instead”, we were hooked. We followed Kurt’s life and writings, even to the point of emulating him. In one of his writings, he made some comments about getting old. For someone who once attempted suicide, he regards death from old age as a semi-colon, not a period (as what he thought Hemingway did when he committed suicide). In most of his writings, he never failed to mention about the pains of getting old. The only thing he said that stops him from committing suicide again is because he wants to set a good example to his children. Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He died from brain injuries after a recent fall from his Manhattan home. We are crestfallen. It made me remember one of his thoughts about death from his novel Slaugtherhouse Five. It captures everything:
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.