Life itself

Kurt Vonnegut offers this cautionary advice to aspiring authors: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” In A Man Without A Country, Vonnegut does not love what is not lovable out of deference for some general principle and so there is no pneumonia. He reckons with the global history of slavery, the bombings of WWII (Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki), and the televised influence of “power-drunk chimpanzees.” Yet honestly, honorably, he touches hope. The creative process makes the soul grow. Music proves the existence of God. Saints: people who behave decently in a strikingly indecent society. The imagination circuit fulfills differently than the information highway. Many of Vonnegut’s heroes share his roots in “freshwater continental country:” Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sandburg, Eugene V. Debs.