Next time someone (like me) tells you we don’t have atheists as interesting as generations past enjoyed, slap them (even me) around the head and remind them of St. Kurt; a divine comedian, a prose-angel and a heavenly atheist:
I got a sappy letter from a woman a while back. She knew I was sappy, too, which is to say a northern Democrat. She was pregnant, and she wanted to know if it was a mistake to bring an innocent little baby into a world this bad.
I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably. They turned up in the most unexpected places. Perhaps you, dear reader, are or can become a saint for her sweet child to meet.
I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around!
– Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake, p. 211.
This book is many things. It is partly a memoir, in that wandering, almost bloggy way of late Vonnegut. It is partly a novel in that post modern high sci-fi way we grew to love. It is also, I could be wrong here, a narrative musing on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. It’s saved from disintegration by the clarity of prose and moral vision. That those things go together is no coincidence and even if we had to relive a hundred years, it’d be worth it.
Your Correspondent, God forbid but he suggest that Kurt is up in heaven now
If you haven’t seen it before, Vonnegut’s http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html is worth a read. If you have seen it before, it is worth a re-read. :o)