The critic’s quote on the cover of “A Man Without A Country” reads: ‘This may be as close as Vonnegut ever comes to a memoir.’ And it was. Vonnegut died earlier this year, and AMWAC was his final work.
I finished reading it today, and I am still trying to make out what I think of it. One thing I am sure of is that I enjoyed it immensely. A collection of essays and personal thoughts, anecdotes and even poems, it’s completely different from anything I’ve read by the author of “Slaughterhouse Five” and “Cat’s Cradle.”
And it provides a new insight into Vonnegut’s personal thoughts, musings, beliefs and ideas on subjects such as capitalism, war, President Bush and the environment – notions that are presented much more subtly in his other works and can only really be guessed and grasped at. But in AMWAC, they are presented clearly and concisely in the same language and style that he has used effectively to tell his previous stories.
So, what follows is a collection of the passages from the book that affected me the most and, I think, give the most compelling picture of who Vonnegut really was.
* While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one soldier said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, “I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.” Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it. At least we were still alive! He proved it.
* If you want to really 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 how 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 good friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
* Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t the TV news is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.
* Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.
* When you get to my age, if you get to my age, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, “What is life all about?” … I put my big question about my life to my son the pediatrician. Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
* Abraham Lincoln said this about the silenced killing grounds at Gettysburg:
"We cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract."
Poetry! It was still possible to make horror and grief in wartime seem almost beautiful. Americans could have illusions of honour and dignity when they thought of war.
* James Polk was the person Representative Lincoln had in mind when he said what he said. Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his president, his armed forces’ commander-in-chief:
"Trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory – that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood – that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy – he plunged into war.
Holy shit! And I thought I was the writer!"
On responding to a woman who wrote to Vonnegut about being 43 and pregnant with her first child:
Don’t do it! I wanted to tell her. It could be another George W. Bush or Lucrezia Borgia. The kid would be lucky to be born into a society where even the poor are overweight but unlucky to be in one without a national health plan or decent public education for most, where lethal injection and welfare are forms of entertainment, and where it costs an arm and a leg to go to college. … But I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.
* Requiem:
The crucified planet Earth
Should it find a voice
And a sense of irony
Might now well say
Of our abuse of it
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”
The irony would be
That we know what
We are doing.
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
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