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Brotherhood 2.0: April 12th: A Eulogy for Vonnegut

2007-04-12 · reading · John · 2:48 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Books & writing · mode: Personal essay · tags: timely hook, heavy topic

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

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

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

  • ★★ Kurt Vonnegut (quoted): 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
  • ★★ Kurt Vonnegut (quoted): 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
  • ★ Kurt Vonnegut (quoted): Vonnegut gives the lake as three miles long and two and a half miles across at its widest. — 00:00:41
  • ★★★ Kurt Vonnegut (quoted): 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. (speculative) — 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

  • ★★ Kurt Vonnegut (quoted): 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
  • ★ Kurt Vonnegut (quoted): 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

  • ★★★ Kurt Vonnegut (quoted): 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
  • ★★ Kurt Vonnegut (quoted): 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

Mentioned

Central: Fates Worse Than Death · Kurt Vonnegut

Also centred on Kurt Vonnegut: Searching for Betsy in Brazil

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