Kurt Vonnegut's Advice To A High School Class, and His Daughter Nanette

Robert,

Late in his long life, Kurt Vonnegut wrote this letter of advice to a high school class:

“...Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience BECOMING, to find out what’s inside you, to MAKE YOUR SOUL GROW.”

And he wrote this advice to his daughter Nanette:

 "...Most letters from a parent contain a parent’s own lost dreams disguised as good advice. My good advice to you Nan is to pay somebody to teach you to speak some foreign language, to meet with you two or three times a week and talk. Also: get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument. What makes this advice especially hollow and pious is that I am not dead yet. If it were any good, I could easily take it myself."

 And this:

"Dear Old Nanno –

You’re learning now that you do not inhabit a solid, reliable, social structure — that the older you get people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few days ago.

So home can fall apart and schools can fall apart, usually for childish reasons, and what have you got? A space wandered named Nan.And that’s O.K. I’m a space wandered named Kurt, and Jane’s a space wandered named Jane, and so on.

When things go well for days on end, it is an hilarious accident.You’re dismayed at having lost a year, maybe, because the school fell apart. Well — I feel as though I’ve lost the years since Slaughterhouse Five was published, but that’s malarky. Those years weren’t lost. They simply weren’t the way I’d planned them. Neither was the year in which Jim had to stay motionless in bed while he got over TB. Neither was the year in which Mark went crazy, then put himself together again. Those years were adventures. Planned years are not. I look back on my own life and I wouldn’t change anything. . . .

Later in the same letter, he adds another piece of advice:

"..I think it’s important to live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy."


Via Maria Popova.