A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
Review and Rating: 8.9 / 10
I thought this would be a novel. But, it turned out to be an autobiography of Vonnegut’s journey as a writer combined with bits of wit and wisdom. It was a wonderful surprise.
I chuckled and smirked in silence incessantly as I enjoyed Vonnegut’s words in the solitude of coffee shops and seats by a window. He wrote the kind of humour that made great comedy stand-ups awe-inspiring.
Vonnegut is my literary Charlie Munger. I wish he were alive in the era of modern technology so we would have more of his wit and wisdom recorded and readily available. The book made a convincing case that it would be a net good for the world to read it.
He was the rare specimen who actually said what needed to be said and left the audience smiling and satisfied after a mental orgasm. I shouldn’t have expected any less from an author focused on telling the truth.
“You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You’re not expecting it.”
But he was right. I still didn’t expect it.
Coated in the jokes and humourous passages, I got whiffs of Vonnegut’s pessimism and cynicism towards the human race. But, looking back, I think it was a book of setting expectations and preparing the honourable for the reality that awaited them.
He was preparing those who sought to improve humanity that they would not be thanked. That any desire for external reward or validation for greatness would only arrive in the rarest of cases and it would not be related to the impact of the work.
By playing out how unforgiving, unaccepting, and unsupportive society will be, Vonnegut stirred the reader to focus on the intrinsic scorecard. He was preparing the reader, to test their will, because if they lost faith from reading the book, then they wouldn’t have been ready for the real world.
He set the stage that life as an artist will be tough. But, he maintained a positive attitude throughout and continued to encourage the driven to do good for humanity, not for any external reward but for the salvation of their soul.
Notes, Takeaways & Thoughts:
Humour is a response to fear and frustration.
Twerp: A person who hasn’t read Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. Per Tocqueville, ‘no country other than ours has love of money taken a stronger hold on the affections of men.’ Were they so predictable back in 1835?
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” - Albert Camus
I think Vonnegut’s mention of Camus was the final push I needed to read his works.
Consider how the core message of all great literature is how much it sucks to be a human being.
Don’t blame the ideas. It’s those who execute the interpretation of such ideas who should be held responsible. One cannot blame doctrines, rules or ideas for blind negligence in the department of thought.
“Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churched than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition.”
Vonnegut came from a family of artists. I loved how he made it a point to say he was not rebellious in his pursuit of the arts. He was merely taking over the family business. There’s a realistic satisfaction with that.
“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorian’s misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”
“I was a hack. I’d write anything to make money, you know.”
Aim to tell the truth when you write. It’s supposed to be hard. That’s what led to Vonnegut using the subtext of the Children’s Crusade to tell his story from the events at Dresden in WWII. He was a soldier in occupation but a child in understanding when looking back at the event that transpired 23 years before Slaughterhouse Five.
“You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You’re not expecting it.”
Don’t use semicolons.
“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.”
Good or bad, your reward for pursuing the arts is that you would’ve created something. Isn’t that wonderful?
No matter what type of story you tell, it must tell the truth. There is no silver bullet way to craft a story structure. All that matters is you tell the truth. Focus on that. It’s hard enough to just focus on that. Telling the truth is the 80/20 of writing but it might just be the 90/10.
“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”
A complete sentence has a subject and verb.
“I am, of course, notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.”
America has always been a hotbed of discrimination. An Anglo-American girl wouldn’t marry Vonnegut because he was German-American. Humans will always find a way to discriminate. Our tools are race, gender, sex, status, etc.
“What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you can do.”
“Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around.”
He had seven kids, four adopted.
Wars make billionaires out of millionaires. It’s laundering money for the rich and corrupt through the chaos. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Slavery was illegal in Mexico in the 1840s, long before Lincoln saved America. But the Americans went to murder Mexicans and take California, Texas, Nevada, Arizona and Utah and made me all slave lands. If this was taught in their schools, I would expect more humility from the nation’s people. But a visual lack of it shows otherwise. Pride is one thing but to call themselves the greatest country on Earth is absurdist.
“Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen the First World War. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were to American inventions, barded wide and the machine gun.”
People blame Nietzsche for Hitler and Nazism. But Hitler was Christian, shouldn’t the Pope be blamed then? Harvard made napalm bombs, when will they pay for their crimes against humanity?
Ignaz Semmelweis was the Austrian doctor who saved millions (probably hundreds of millions or even billions now) of lives by telling doctors to wash their hands. Prior to, doctors stuck their dirty blood-soaked hands into other people, even for delivering babies. He was ridiculed for telling doctors to wash their hands as the cure to the problem of such high mortality rates in hospitals. They started washing their hands to show Semmelweis how much of an idiot he was. But it worked. They rewarded him by banishing him to a far-off hospital away from Vienna into Hungary. There, he committed suicide by cutting himself with a scalpel to die from the blood poisoning he helped prevent. Don’t ever expect people to thank you for doing the right thing. You do it anyway, not for the thanks. It’s not nihilistic to expect people not to do the right thing. It’s just facing the Truth. If they do the right thing, it should be a surprise. All you can do is do the right thing in your daily life, maybe a few others will as well. It’s teh minority of people who do the right thing that move society forward. Most people won’t ever do it and that’s where believing the majority has value is wrong. They just lumber along, trampling on the backs of those that did the hard work for them and never got an ounce of gratitude for it. Most will hate the wise human. But who cares? Do the honourable thing and save their lives anyway.
“Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” - Confucius. Not Jesus.
Washington D.C. is where the C-students from Yale go.
People say they want to see decisiveness in a leader. But they fail to see all the sociopaths they’ve brought in and given power to: “They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and there are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next.”
“Only nut cases want to be president. This was tru even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.” This is true, I am guilty.
“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” Bokonon, from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle
If humour is a way of dealing with the awfulness of life, do we die once we’ve lost our sense of humour? I imagine this death could be literal as well as theoretical. Much of the adult world seems to be filled with zombies devoid of a sense of humour the rate they cancel comedians.
“I’m startled that I became a writer. I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming.” Me too. Thanks for not making me feel alone.
“…please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”
“There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.” — Saul Steinberg the graphic artist
“…why you respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations.” — Saul Steinberg