So it goes.

There are plenty of others who have done more elequoent elegiacs than this one will be, but I felt I had to at least mention the passing of Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut is of course the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, among other novels. I first read S-5 when I was a senior in high school. A friend had given me a copy and recommended it right before he left for college, and he mentioned something about space aliens and time-travel. The book left a deep and permanent mark on me. It is one of a handful of books that changed the way I think about the world. It remains my stock answer to the inanswerable question: what is your favorite book? The book is a diamond, constructed of short, hard sentences. The structural integrity is unimpeachable.

Vonnegut has more clarity, empathy, and humor than almost any writer you'll come across. He is both a cynic and a humanitarian; a moral innocent and a wizened old crank. He tried to warn the world about its insane impulses but was able to find joy in the strangeness of human interaction. He will be missed more than I can express. I'll leave you with some quotes from the old man:

• Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

• Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

• I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

• If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

• True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

• One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

• 1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

• Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

• (talking about when he tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.

• I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.This is it:"Nothing."

• The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.But the Gospels actually taught this:Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

This could go on forever, so I'll just try to pick an appropriate one to end with:

• The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.