Kurt Vonnegut, a favorite novelist of many of us around here, died yesterday at the age of 84. Author of 14 novels that could make you laugh out loud and cry on the same page, his best known was the 1969 book Slaughterhouse-Five, the story of the young Billy Pilgrim who became an “unstuck in time” time traveler after surviving the bombing of Dresden in World War II. If you like reading Gizmodo and aren’t familiar with Vonnegut’s work, this book is a great place to start.
Click to the next page to read Vonnegut’s last published words, the closing lines of his poem entitled “Requiem.” Now it’s Vonnegut who’s become unstuck in time. So it goes.
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
