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i thought this letter in the Guardian Review section on the 14th June 2008 deserved a wider notice:
found here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2285506,00.html
Happy Vonnegut
In Jan Morris's review of Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect ("He's out of here", May 31), she makes the common error of assuming that "Vonnegut's final emotion was despair". At one point, Morris says that Vonnegut's "only faith was in literature". Not so. In 1993, I wrote something that attempted to summarise Vonnegut's working ethic. On receipt of a copy, he responded with a letter that ended:
"I have been smug about my inability to define the faith which has entitled me to be so cheerfully disrespectful of popular spiritual paradigms. But now you have identified it correctly and simply. It is indeed a belief that good-hearted, intelligent, informed human beings can steer history through stormy water, bringing it at last to a sheltered anchorage on the rim of a virgin continent."
Craig Newnes
Shrewsbury
found here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2285506,00.html
Happy Vonnegut
In Jan Morris's review of Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect ("He's out of here", May 31), she makes the common error of assuming that "Vonnegut's final emotion was despair". At one point, Morris says that Vonnegut's "only faith was in literature". Not so. In 1993, I wrote something that attempted to summarise Vonnegut's working ethic. On receipt of a copy, he responded with a letter that ended:
"I have been smug about my inability to define the faith which has entitled me to be so cheerfully disrespectful of popular spiritual paradigms. But now you have identified it correctly and simply. It is indeed a belief that good-hearted, intelligent, informed human beings can steer history through stormy water, bringing it at last to a sheltered anchorage on the rim of a virgin continent."
Craig Newnes
Shrewsbury
