Book Report: A Man without a Country

I picked up Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man without a Country when it was waiting to be reshelved at the library that employs me, and I read it on my lunch break. There isn’t much to it.

I read a ton of Mr. Vonnegut’s stuff when I was in high school, and perhaps in college as well. Loved it. It was among the first stuff I read to be merciless in calling much of the world’s society bullshit, to say that the ideals we proclaimed were not the ones we lived by, and that the world could be set up on entirely different principles than it is and be no less virtuous and ethical. As I got older, I liked his stuff less well. It’s still funny stuff, and I enjoy the structural wildness more than I probably did as a teenager, but I have found that much of society’s bullshit is not, in fact, bullshit, and that a merciless bullshit-caller is not necessarily wiser than a deluded conformist.

Part of that is connected with my adult choice to believe in the Divine, and to connect myself with my religious tradition. I appreciate the ridiculousness of that choice, and of much of the tradition, and yet I made it because there is more to it than the ridiculousness. By doing so, I let myself in for Mr. Vonnegut’s contempt. It’s easier to read his stuff when you are going through an atheist period. I suspect that for people who go through their atheist period and come out atheists, his stuff is still better when they are going through their atheist periods. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think everyone should probably go through an atheist period, and that reading Kurt Vonnegut books to spark that period or make it brighter is a pretty good thing, actually.

I suppose I don’t mean that everyone should go through an atheist period, in the sense that people who don’t go through an atheist period are in worse shape for some reason. But I think an atheist period is a good experience for a person to have been through; it prepares you to think about religion seriously. A passionately anti-clerical but theistic period might do the same thing, I suppose. Hard to compare notes.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.