Kurt Vonnegut has died. So it goes.

To lose a peer is a frightening experience. The knowledge that a contemporary, someone of your own age, your own generation, has died, gives you little choice but to consider your own mortality. Anyone familiar with his writing knows that Kurt Vonnegut faced this many times, and had considered his mortality at great length. He would despair, and he would make his peace, and he would repeat the process all over again, often in the course of a few short paragraphs in a short chapter. Perhaps he had it right; coming to terms with one’s mortality is no reason to stop searching for fresh insights on the matter. Perhaps my familiarity with his work is the reason I feel queasy whenever I meet someone who’s completely sure of something.

I have not lost a peer. Kurt Vonnegut had lived for fifty-eight years before I was born, and had already written much of his most influential work. Instead, my colleagues and I have lost another in a long line of teachers and, for lack of a better word, heroes.

As I have remarked in the past, I have a nasty record with heroes, and it’s been getting worse lately. The last ten years have given us nearly constant bad news about the people we admire. Vonnegut of course, and Douglas Adams, Hunter S. Thompson, and Robert Anton Wilson, just to list the first few writers who spring to mind. Johnny Cash is gone, and the other Beatle I liked, and we’ve only got one Ramone left. A cool professor who I never met shall lecture forevermore in Valhalla. For years, I have joked that all the cool people are fleeing the planet to avoid some impending catastrophe. I now suspect I should not have called it a joke.

These writers and artists, these philosophers, sages, luminaries and other professional thinking persons, gave us, their students, the greatest gift imaginable: they made us realize that we weren’t all that original, and that all the crazy crap we’d thought of had been published twenty years earlier. Suddenly we had guides, people who had gone through all the madness before us, and who had been kind enough to take notes. And best of all, a lot of them were still alive! Whenever the world started getting too crazy, we could ask them if they’d ever seen anything like it before, and how they got through it the first time.

Whenever the world loses such a guide, we feel as though we have been sent out into the wilderness before our time, our training left incomplete. There are no benevolent blue Jedi ghosts to tell us we’re ready. In time we will become confident enough to carry on the work of those who came before. Perhaps someone will even emerge as a worthy successor. That process is slow, however, and in the meantime we can only wait to see which of these impudent young grasshoppers will rise up to inspire the next generation of artists, geeks, and idealists.

Until that happens, I know that I am not alone in hoping for one final insight or insult or hallucination from Mr. Vonnegut, one last bit of satire dressed up as wide-eyed innocence.

Like Vonnegut, I pause to read over what I have written, and wish I had written something else. I wish that my points didn’t wander, and I wish my revelations only came at appropriate times, instead of popping in to fuck up a lovely obituary. In a part of my mind that should know better, I wish he hadn’t died in the same old way everyone else dies, with the same three words he had long appended to each life lost: so it goes.

In the end, though, that’s the point. We may be lost in the wilderness, and fully justified in feeling upset, but we will continue moving forward through time whether we choose to or not. Kurt Vonnegut, yet another of our lights, our sages, is dead; his linear stroll through time has ended. So it goes.