Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut has evidently died. I'm upset, and it's hard to explain. Part of it, no doubt, was discovering Vonnegut as a 10th grader in English class. I'd been given the assignment of reading the first chapter or so of Cat's Cradle and as was my tendency, I ended up staying up the whole night and finishing the book. When I came into class the next day, after sitting in silence for a few moments waiting for the teacher to begin, he slapped his hand down on the desk next to where I sat and said, you finished the whole thing, didn't you? I didn't know what he meant at first, and he had to clarify but the answer was yes. He proceeded to bitch me out, telling me how it wasn't the way you were supposed to do it, etc. But of course, what was interesting, was that he knew I read the whole thing without my having said or done anything that indicated it. He knew it because he knew Vonnegut and he knew me and he knew I'd stumbled on something that would never have allowed me to stop reading.
I read all of Vonnegut's books over time. I felt like he was a different version of myself, an expression of thoughts I might have in the future. He had this melancholy optimism, it was me, but a me who had accepted certain things and rejected certain things and figured out how to deal with everything else and as a result, had distilled certain truths about mankind and life into humorous and poignant vignettes.
I was reading the nyt obit and was somewhat surprised to read the discussion of critics who claimed he repeated things - which of course he did - but that was a large part of what made his oeuvre. It wasn't exactly repetition, but actually development of an idea. You put something in one situation, and one thing happens. In another, an entirely separate thing happens. If anything, Vonnegut was didactic, but not in a condescending sense. He was a teacher, with that calm surety that allowed him to float his ideas without too much direction.
His existence made me feel like there was a place for me. Silly, in a way, but that he had found a place made it at least possible that I would as well. He wasn't just like me, but he was like part of me.