Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’
Vonnegut was eminently quotable, but you know, some of his critics were right: he kept saying the same things in different ways. A good thing, too: this survivor of the Dresden firebombing knew that it’s difficult to get the message of fundamental humanism across.
If Ezra Pound’s declaration that “artists are the antennae of the race” was ever true, it has been true of Kurt Vonnegut. His bitter humour and unblinking existentialism never careened off into nihilism. He appealed only for common sense: for decency, for grace, for something redemptive in the temporal crucible.
The gravestone in Slaughterhouse-Five says:
EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL
AND NOTHING HURT
Rest now, you scamp—you prophet—you jewel of the species. Rest in peace.
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