Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

Last night I was reading the foreword of Bartlett’s Word’s To Live By which was written by Kurt Vonnegut. In it he referenced this anonymous quote “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

Now, I don’t know about you but to me this sounds like the closing of an AA meeting. Vonnegut interpreted it another way:

“This was said in 1943 by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), simply as part of a sermon on Cape Cod, I’m told. No big deal, he thought. But it was almost as though Albert Einstein had been playing the fiddle and suddenly heard himself say, “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.” And Niebuhr’s prayer does indeed have a similar mathematical clarity. I put that prayer into a novel of mine, incidentally, which was published in what used to be the Soviet Union. I am told that thousands of people were thunderstruck by its good sense and copied it out and put it up on a wall or whatever. And communism went bust.”

I read both Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions during one dull weekend in 2002. I really enjoyed them both with the exception of the hints of egotism as both a character in the first and in the latter mentioned book, as the copout dues ex machina ending. Most of all I especially liked how I suddenly was aware of all the pop culture references to Vonnegut around me. He used the quote “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” in both novels which the band MeWithoutYou used it in a song. The 90’s Atlanta based band Billy Pilgrim, who I had listened to before reading the books, was named after the Slaughterhouse-Five’s protagonist. I am sure there are countless others I have yet to stumble upon.

Let me get to the point here. What is he saying? Is he implying that one of his writings brought the downfall of communism likening himself to a contemporary Martin Luther with pages of his book nailed to “a wall or whatever” but coming off as an internet inventing Al Gore? Huh. I can't seem to wrap my head aroung this little thing and come up with a comfortable explanation as to his motivation for writing that.

He also fancies himself a Mark Twain-like artist by coping his look. I think he looks like Jim Croce.