Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

[asindreams]

In the wake of the passing of authors like Mr. Vonnegut, the concurrent modern death of reading and writing and powerful language seems for a moment justified... if anything should make the written word fade, it shouldn't be Britney Spears or George W. Bush or Sanjaya.  It should be those falling giants of literature, each a tumbling redwood emptying the forest slowly and finally, unable to be replanted or replaced.  Spilling and rotting into fertilizer, hoping against hope that someday an errant seed will blow nearby.  Writers of his caliber are powerful enough in life to make us think that the forest, the sumtotal of our thoughts and loves and experiences, has only ever been the size of the Amazon, unnervingly vast, an eye-rubbing blazing monolithic human jungle.  They're brilliant enough to make us forget how to see that forest for the trees - to con us into thinking we're that beautiful, that our lives are that full and that full of possibility.  They're deceptive, and lying, and absolutely heartbreaking.  They are the only gods we have left, these gigantic wooden pillars.

But I'm again reminded of what's happening in the real Amazon, and it stirs me to think that perhaps the falling of giants isn't such a rare sight these days.

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."

Thanks, Mr. Vonnegut, and goodbye.