I was almost half way through Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without A Country on the Monday I was about to leave for Chicago. Reading Vonnegut's fictions always gives me huge pleasure as well as a good time of laughing and a heck of big time of contemplation since my very first acquaintance with his Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. I read this piece, I guess, as a tribute to the world's lost on another good writer, Vonnegut, earlier this spring. Were he alive, I bet he's one of the wisest, wickedly funny and adorable old man that rebuffs with "Bahs" once in a while when he disagrees with something he's seen and heard. You can tell that from the passage he writes about the Hindu girl he says he "falls in love with" in the post office, or any other passages he sounds cynical and sarcastic.
In this mini-memoir, Vonnegut talks about his philosophical reflections on recent events, political ones, philosophical (-of-life) ones and admonishments and responses to his readers. As a truthful and honest writer without fear or restraints when it comes to criticism and mockery of his country, the world and the humanities, Vonnegut's satirical and cynical comments on war and on the political storms and decisions that his fellow-Americans and politicians have made remain powerful, thoughtful and hilariously reasonable as usual.
Now that I finish this last book of his, I feel a bit of "lost" in two ways: lost in his perspectives and discontents on technology and his last perception and standpoint in face of death and the issue of death; I am also lost in feeling a bit hopeless on humanity and on the world's inevitable lost of such a insightful and brave commentator.