Hope, Not Confidence. Kurt Vonnegut Talks to Women and Men

You know who I like to read? Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I especially like his nonfiction, and when his late fiction veers into semi-autobiography hidden behind his alter, Kilgore Trout, I like that, too.

I picked up the recent collection of Vonnegut's commencement addresses, If this isn't Nice, What Is? 

For the avid Vonnegut reader, very little of the material here is new. Either parts of it have already appeared entirely in previous books, or anecdotes get recycled, or the general tone is already familiar.

However, this is a worthwhile volume because it collects the addresses as delivered, and allows readers to see how Vonnegut's concerns, and his attitude toward young people and eduction stayed constant, while deepening. Familiar anecdotes become fresh as Vonnegut's speaking voice jumps off the page, and as the stories illuminate his abiding humanity in all its conflicted love for who we are, and trepidation about what we do.

In talking to Fredonia College grads in 1978, this is what he had to say:

I am being so silly because I pity you so much. I pity all of us so much. Life is going to be very tough again, just as soon as this is over. And the most useful thought we can hold when all hell cuts loos again is that we are not members of different generations, as unlike, as some people would have us believe, as Eskimos and Australian Aborigines. We are all so close to each other in time that we should think of ourselves as brothers and sisters...

We are all experiencing more or less the same lifetime now.

What is it the slightly older people want from the slightly younger people? They want credit for having survived so long, and often so imaginatively, under difficult conditions. Slightly younger people are intolerably stingy about giving them credit for that.

What is it the slightly younger people want from the slightly older people? More than anything, I think, they want acknowledgement, and without further ado, that they are without question women and men now. Slightly older people are intolerably stingy about making any such acknowledgement.

And so it goes. This is not a book full of advice designed to give people much confidence. Vonnegut isn't in the confidence game. He's in the hope game, and these addresses are full of hopeful tips on getting along in a world where wildly bad things happen, so why not take a moment when things are nice and say, out loud, "If this isn't nice, what is?"

If you think about buying this book, why not buy it from an independent book store, like Schuler Books? Here's a link.