Adam Gartenberg's Blog

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

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• Author: Adam S Gartenberg
• April 12, 2007
• Category:  Miscellaneous 

The world has lost a great thinker, writer, and provocateur.  I think at one point or another I've read and re-read just about all of Kurt Vonnegut's books, some to the point where they were falling apart.  Some I read through quickly, and some took a long time because I kept finding my mind heading off on strange tangents prompted by his writing; I'd look down at the book and realize I've spent 30 minutes "reading" and hadn't turned a page.  Some of the concepts and analogies in his books come to mind regularly when I'm thinking through work or everyday problems.

The Web and traditional media are more than full of quotes and stories and retrospectives on his life and work, so I thought I'd pass on something that you probably wouldn't have come across elsewhere - Vonnegut's reflections on his time spent as an editor for The Cornell Daily Sun, from a speech he delivered in 1980 for The Sun’s traditional end-of-year banquet.

I was happiest when I was all alone — and it was very late at night, and I was walking up the hill after having helped to put The Sun to bed.

All the other university people, teachers and students alike, were asleep. They had been playing games all day long with what was known about real life. They had been repeating famous arguments and experiments, and asking one another the sorts of hard questions real life would be asking by and by.

We on The Sun were already in the midst of real life. By God, if we weren’t! We had just designed and written and caused to be manufactured yet another morning newspaper for a highly intelligent American community of respectable size — yes, and not during the Harding administration, either, but during 1940, ’41 and ’42, with the Great Depression ending, and with World War Two well begun.

I am an atheist, as some of you have gleaned from my writings. But I have to tell you that, as I trudged up the hill so late at night and all alone, I knew that God Almighty approved of me.

— Kurt Vonnegut ’44

Link:  Perspectives on The Cornell Daily Sun

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