Tugging Half Way

This is a chimney through a view out the window in yet another hall, faded too far out as I fiddle on the camera phone; waking up in the country with an awful too little too late feeling, business in connection. I don't know how to rescue myself.

We came up close, were lost for words, lapsed into silence, staring at the floor with tears misting; as if anybody could understand. As if anyone would forgive the deep levels of stupidity. As if old fashioned depression wasn't something that just had to be borne; there wasn't a pill for everything.

Mad, not bad, they say; but we weren't certain; the images which had been so loud and proud; the purpose, when everything felt right, was gone; and he had the unabashed desire to get plastered; instead of staring thoughtfully out of windows and listening sceptically to story after story. God rescued me, they all say, and he tried to shrug off the feeling that he had been caught in some terrible cult. And what prime material he was. Infinite desire. He had always wanted to be saved by some exterior force.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Final chapter closes on Vonnegut
AP
New York: In books such as Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, and Hocus Pocus, Kurt Vonnegut mixed the bitter and funny with a touch of the profound.
Vonnegut, regarded by many critics as a key influence in shaping 20th-century American literature, died on Wednesday at 84. He had suffered brain injuries after a recent fall at his Manhattan home, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
In a statement, Norman Mailer hailed Vonnegut as "a marvellous writer with a style that remained undeniably and imperturbably his own.
"I would salute him - our own Mark Twain. He was sort of like nobody else," said fellow author Gore Vidal. "Kurt was never dull."
Vonnegut's works - more than a dozen novels plus short stories, essays and plays - contained elements of social commentary, science fiction and autobiography.
Hours after his death, Slaughterhouse-Five had jumped to the top 10 on book sales site Amazon.com, while Cat's Cradle and the nonfiction A Man Without a Country had reached the top 40.
Vonnegut's longtime friend and manager, Donald Farber, said there would be no public memorial, only a private gathering of family and friends. He also said other Vonnegut books were likely to come out, but declined to offer specifics.
Protagonists
A self-described religious sceptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim (Slaughterhouse-Five) and Eliot Rosewater (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater) as transparent vehicles for his points of view.
He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanising people.
"He was a man who combined a wicked sense of humour and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important," said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.
Some of Vonnegut's books were banned and burned for alleged obscenity. He took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific scepticism, made him its honorary president.
Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.
Depression
"I like to say that the 51st state is the state of denial," he said in 2005. "It's as though a huge comet were heading for us and nobody wants to talk about it.
We're just about to run out of petroleum and there's nothing to replace it."
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction.
But his novels became cult classics, especially Cat's Cradle in 1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.
Short articles
He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with A Man Without a Country, a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration ("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography" and the uncertain future of the planet.
He called the book's success "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life." Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister's three young children after she died.
He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, Krementz.
Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he would prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.
"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut said.
"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."