So It Goes: From Ilium To Tralfamadore

Kurt Vonnegut has come unstuck in time.

The dark-humored, Mark Twainesque science-fiction satirist, who described himself as "A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much), who as an American infantry scout … as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany … and survived to tell the tale," died yesterday, after sustaining brain injury from a fall.

The rest of the world will have to recapture his lifetime through his novels and essays, and now the articles and programs all over the printed, Web, and broadcast media.

A world without Kurt Vonnegut is much like a world without John Lennon or Gene Roddenberry. Each was a visionary who captured the hearts and minds of a generation or more, and each has left a hole in the world in the space they once occupied.

Kurt Vonnegut, and Billy Pilgrim, his war-torn, time-tripping alter ego in "Slaughterhouse-Five," shared a birthday with me, though with a 35-year difference in age. (Yes, I am 119 years old.)

In 1971, I picked up "Slaughterhouse-Five," when his books bore the name "Kurt Vonnegut Jr." Within two years, I had read all of the books he had published at the time. I stopped reading his books after "Breakfast of Champions," at a time in my life when I had taken a job which didn’t leave much time for reading; however, that job eventually allowed me to meet him briefly and serve him nachos at a fundraising cocktail party. Tongue-tied doesn't begin to describe how that went. I popped a nacho into my mouth to hide my ineptitude. I had never eaten a jalapeno before that moment.

Vonnegut is best known for "Slaughterhouse-Five," his breakthrough novel which became one of the pre-eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century. In it, an ordinary man becomes "unstuck" in time. One minute he's an optometrist in small-town Indiana, the next he's a very young draftee immersed in the 1944 Battle of the Bulge. He travels to his birth, to his death, and then to his life with a Hollywood movie star named Montana Wildhack on a distant planet called Tralfamadore.

While on Tralfamadore, Billy is told that humans don't ultimately destroy the Earth, because Tralfmadore accidentally destroys the universe before humans get that far. That was a moment of revelation for me at the age of 13, because it was the first time I realized we could all die suddenly without ever seeing it coming, and there would be nothing we could do about it.

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