Brotherhood 2.0: April 12th: A Eulogy for Vonnegut

2007-04-12 · John · watch on YouTube · Books & writing · reflection essay

As a eulogy for Kurt Vonnegut, John reads without comment a passage from Vonnegut's Fates Worse Than Death about Lake Maxinkuckee, childhood geography and a lake kept in memory, closing with 'We'll miss you.'

What is said

00:00:00 — Greeting; Vonnegut passage: serenity at the edge of water, Lake Maxinkuckee as his first mental map, the closed loop of its shore; question to the reader about childhood geography

• ★★ Vonnegut writes that wherever he is, reaching the very edge of a natural body of water gives him serenity and tells him where he is and which way home lies. — 00:00:10
• ★★ Vonnegut traces this to making his first mental maps as a small child in summers on the shores of Lake Maxinkuckee in northern Indiana, whose closed-loop shore always led home. — 00:00:10
• ★ Vonnegut gives the lake as three miles long and two and a half miles across at its widest. — 00:00:41
• ★★★ Vonnegut asks the reader, 'my indispensable collaborator', whether their deepest understanding of time, space and destiny is also shaped by earliest experiences of geography and the rules for getting home. — 00:00:41

00:01:11 — Vonnegut passage: the family cottages, his father's generation as successors to the Potawatomi, the relatives' nonsense German call and reply

• ★★ Vonnegut recalls his family's unheated cottage beside four cottages of close relatives; his father's generation had summered there as children, almost immediate successors to the Potawatomi. — 00:01:11
• ★ Vonnegut recalls that his grown father would call out a nonsense phrase from their childhood, German for 'Do abbots mow hay?', and a relative would reply 'Yes, abbots mow hay!' — 00:01:40

00:02:04 — Vonnegut passage: the families vanished without a trace, the lake kept in his head, seen from a plane as dry dust; John's 'We'll miss you' and sign-off

• ★★★ Vonnegut says those families have vanished from the lake without a trace, but he is not sad: imprinted on his young mind, it will be his lake as long as he lives, so he has no wish to visit. — 00:02:04
• ★★ Seeing the lake from about six miles up on a flight from Louisville to Chicago was emotionally uninvolving, Vonnegut writes, because the real lake is the one in his head. — 00:02:04
• ★★★ John marks Kurt Vonnegut's death by reading a passage from Vonnegut's Fates Worse Than Death without comment, adding only 'We'll miss you.' — 00:02:33

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