Kurt Vonnegut dies

NEW YORK TIMES -- Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

I just heard the news. I can't even begin to express the impact that Vonneget's works have had on my life. I think of him in the same way I think of Stanley Kubrick, another giant of post-World War II American artistic landscape: People call them dark. But I never saw them as dark. They may have used the tools of dark humor and satire to make their statements. But the point was the content of those statements. And I like how the Times characterizes that content -- as an urgent moral vision.

Kurt Vonnegut was a man of light, not dark -- a shining beacon of hope screaming that the world could be different and that we humans have been left with a choice of deciding whether the world should be a place of death and violence or a place of light and love. Kurt Vonnegut was asking us to choose life.

Choose life.