God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

"All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."

I was very saddened to read that Kurt Vonnegut has died. Besides thoroughly enjoying several of his books, seeing him speak while I was in college was a significant event in my life. All at once, I came away from his talk having a new perspective on aging. He was brilliant and curious at 74 years old--a far cry from the view much of our society has about our elders. He gave me the vision that growing old could be a continuous journey of new discoveries and wonderment rather than a decline into stagnancy. Maintaining curiosity and unending personal growth have been guiding principles of my life ever since.

During that same speech, he put names to many of the ideas that had been churning in my head for some time. The first time I ever heard the term "secular humanism," it came from his mouth. He spoke about his faith in our capacities as humans to better ourselves and our environment without the palliative of religion.

I have an odd problem of not remembering most of the things I read. I could read an entire book and not be able to tell you much about it two months later. But I still recall very vivid things from every work of Kurt Vonnegut's that I ever read. All of his fictional works are both biting and touching. They fill his readers with hope while chiding us all for our foolishness. Some of my favorites:

• Cat's Cradle--the ultimate parody of religion (see quote above) in which the world is destroyed by fanatics
• Bluebeard--about a contemporary of Jackson Pollack whose works are now forgotten because he accepted a sponsorship from Dura Luxe paints, which, ironically, dissolved over time
• Jailbird--the richest woman in the world masquerades as a homeless woman to avoid the pitfalls of enormous wealth

While speaking to us at the auditorium on the University of Southern Mississippi campus, he made a typically-Vonnegut, dark joke about his friend who had recently passed away being in heaven, then explained that the joke lay in the fact that secular humanists don't believe in heaven. Mr. Vonnegut, I'm sure you and your friend are having a grand old time these days laughing at us all from heaven.