He was more than a brilliant writer, a visionary dreamer or a mad, chain-smoking prophet. He was a part of us.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is dead. (Update - Wikipedia article subject to malicious activity; use caution)

Cat's Cradle was a book that changed everything I understood about the world, changed my world, changed me. I read it a dozen times before I was twenty, perhaps a half-dozen times since then. It's only in the last few years that I've been really able to appreciate it, to get a grasp of what the man has been trying to tell me. I read it again a few years ago and marvelled anew at the power of writing to create imaginary worlds that tell us about the very real world of our own.

Vonnegut was always both outspoken and irreverent, and in later years his rhetoric often bordered on being 'anti-christian' without ever being 'anti-Christ'. This was both a provocative and illuminating stance as, in hindsight, it appears he felt Christians had so marginalized Christ as to render him irrelevant to public discourse. Though he was a writer of extraordinary intelligence  he was fond of profanity and, often, was surprisingly crass. His every word, however, roared with the same wild-eyed, dangerous zeal of any biblical prophet as he bellowed and heaved words from his typewriter, writing books and essays that made us recognize the madness of our collective sin, that made us ponder the darkness of our hearts. He, singular among all of America's literary history, plumbed that darkness with a characteristically bleak wit.

That's the Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I know today, at this adult age. As a teenager, however, it was Cat's Cradle that captured me, that spirited me away to another world that was so very much like my own and yet, so very much unlike it as well. There was a time when I seriously considered Bokonism as my religion. I was searching for God in Vonnegut's writing, though I barely knew it, searching for a way out of the insanity and depravity of the world. It was an important part of my journey, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was a friend along the way.