This Modern Life
I said, "Saul, are you gifted?"
Six seconds passed, and then he growled, "No, but what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her own limitations."
-Saul Steinberg
by way of Kurt Vonnegut
"A Man Without a Country"
I'm not really sure how you're supposed to format the title of a book. I think it's supposed to be in quotation marks, but it might be in italics instead. Could be underlined, but I think that's magazines. These are the things that they teach you in English classes. These are the things that you're supposed to know if you're a writer. This strikes me as rather absurd because, as Mr. Steinberg so insightfully pointed out and Mr. Vonnegut so dutifully conveyed, such trivialties have very little to do with being an artist. Unless your limitations are of a grammatical sort. In that case, you've got much smaller things to worry about.
I like Kurt Vonnegut. I like the things he says to me when he puts words on pages and I like the fact that he seems not to take too seriously what he does. He tells stories. He tells a lot of stories about a lot of different things, but almost all of them are excuses to talk to you. To let you know what he's thinking. And I can't think of anything more human than that. One of the things that Kurt Vonnegut seems to spend a lot of time talking about is modern life, and how we seem to be determined to use it to destroy ourselves and the rest of the world along with us. I'm not so sure about that, but I have to admit that he's on to something. I know that modern life is killing me. Nto that I've ever experienced anything different. And maybe that's a statement shared by members of every generation. But it seems more than a little ironic to me that now, at a time when man has more opportunity to express himself than at any other time in existence, no one seems to want to listen. We live in a world where most of us can contact almost anyone we know, at almost any time, through a variety fo different methods. yet we feel so alone. Why? I suspect that it's because we're all so busy trying to be heard that no one is taking time to listen. I picture us, a tiny little rock floating throught the sky, with 6 billion voice crying out to heaven. And God, staring back down at us, shouting, "If you'd just shut up for a second, I could answer you."
He doesn't like to be interrupted.