A humanist, in the best sense of the term

Amazon made some kind of deal with the late Kurt Vonnegut (Jr.)'s estate, and has been releasing some of his previously uncollected short fiction in Kindle editions. It was uncollected for a good reason: it's mostly rather slight fare, with little of the intellectual heft or daring of his breakout Slaughterhouse Five or the underappreciated Galapagos. Nonetheless, reading it has been a helpful refresher for me.

I discovered Vonnegut during my senior year of high school, and had worked through all his published works by the time I graduated college. Having been confronted by the bleak nihilism of Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions, I wasn't surprised to learn that John Irving, in whose world according to Garp we are all terminal cases, studied under Vonnegut at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. In spite of my youth, however, the nihilism wasn't why I compulsively read Vonnegut.

Instead, it was his humanism, in the best sense of the term. Vonnegut, for all his despair over humanity's fatal flaws, loved human beings and insisted on treating all people as such. That humanism informs even the early writings now being released, the stuff he wrote for popular magazines back when popular magazines published short fiction rather than cooking tips from vapid celebrities. (I can't find the quote, but I remember Vonnegut writing about selling short stories to Cosmopolitan long before it became "a harrowingly explicit sex manual.") Every page drips with compassion for his characters, even when he's making fun of them.

Cynicism is filled with contempt, and Kurt Vonnegut was no cynic. He was a humanist, in the best sense of the term, and that's why I still find his writing refreshing.