One good reason we have to die

Because we’re alive. Well, some of us are. Others of us are, as Marvin Breed puts it in Cat’s Cradle, ‘born dead… Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.’

Kurt Vonnegut – cantankerous, wise-cracking, chain-smoking livewire that he was – is gone now, and it’s a loss to all of us that he’ll never again take wonky aim at some absurdity in our own crooked natures and, in a shower of shells, find that sweet, dark spot. He was an awful lot of things, but one thing he certainly wasn’t was dead in any aspect.

But like he says in this interview, ‘there are a number of dead people out there… but, fortunately, you don’t have to go to Heaven to talk to some of them. A lot of them have left us amazing things on paper, and so their lives persist here anyway. Wonderful words. Beautiful music. Stunning things that resonate.’

So many other people are paying far more eloquent tributes than this sketchy attempt, but in my own wonky way, I want to say Kurt, thanks for all the wise and lunatic conversations you’ve left behind so that we don’t have to go to Heaven to keep having them with you. Thanks for all the foma.