Timequake

I've always liked Kurt Vonnegut's writing style. Absurd situations punctuated with moments of poignancy - his stories match my experience. Life is bizarre, inscrutable and occasionally, momentarily, incredibly beautiful.

In Timequake, speaking in his own voice, Vonnegut tells of a real conversation he had with his dying ex-wife. I'm a sucker for stuff like this when it's surrounded by healthy doses of things like time travel and case studies of human nonsensicalness:

Our last conversation was intimate. Jane asked me, as though I knew, what would determine the exact moment of her death. She may have felt like a character in a book by me. In a sense she was. During our twenty-two years of marriage, I had decided where we were going next, to Chicago, to Schenectady, to Cape Cod. It was my work that determined what we did next. She never had a job. Raising six kids was enough for her.

I told her on the telephone that a sunburned, raffish, bored but not unhappy ten-year-old boy, whom we did not know, would be standing on the gravel slope of the boat-launching ramp at the foot of Scudder's Lane. He would gaze out at nothing in particular, birds, boats, or whatever, in the harbor of Barnstable, Cape Cod.

At the head of Scudder's Lane, on Route 6A, one-tenth of a mile from the boat-launching ramp, is the big old house where we cared for our son and two daughters and three sons of my sister's until they were grownups. Our daughter Edith and her builder husband, John Squibb, and their small sons, Will and Buck, live there now.

I told Jane that this boy, with nothing better to do, would pick up a stone, as boys will. He would arc it over the harbor. When the stone hit the water, she would die.

Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being alive seem full of white magic. That was her strength.

It's a testament to something that even invented, unreasonable connections like that can give us pause. We're wired to hunger for meaning? The world is such a wreck that even the stretchiest attempt to cause-and-effect it prompts a response?