BooksVideokurt vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's Advice For High Schoolers Is Advice For Us All (VIDEO)

Kurt Vonnegut's Advice For High Schoolers Is Advice For Us All
By 

Associate Editor, Huffington Post Weird News

In 2006, a class of students at New York's Xavier High School were tasked with writing their favorite authors and inviting them to school. Five students wrote to Kurt Vonnegut, who was subsequently the sole author to respond to the class.

His response letter has since been turned into a short video called "Make Your Soul Grow" by Dogtooth Films, released earlier in 2014, made with students from the United Kingdom's Hove Park School.

Vonnegut was 84 years old in 2006, when he sent students his heartfelt note. In it he purveyed wisdom on living a fruitful and art-filled life. In the closing of his letter, he in turn tasked the students with another assignment: to write a six-line poem, about anything.

Read the letter, which was authenticated by the high school, in full below:

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don't make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: 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.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you're Count Dracula.

Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don't do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals [sic]. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut's words ring true as much today as when he wrote them, a year before his death in 2007.

Watch the film adaptation of his letter above to hear the celebrated author's timeless advice.


h/t: Dangerous Minds

Related

booksVideokurt vonnegut

Before You Go

Joshua Cohen as James Joyce
There's something particularly Joycean about Joshua Cohen, and not just because the writers share nearly identical round eyeglasses or a penchant for long sentences and penning 800 page novels. The most obvious parallel between the two is Joyce's Ulysses and Cohen's Witz, for their stream-of-conscious language play and paper weight at 736 pages and 824 pages, respectively. But elsewhere, too, they render their drastically different landscapes similarly: Joyce meticulously dictates the corners and crosswalks of Dublin throughout several books the way Cohen investigates the virtual space of the Internet and the blogs that populate a simulated neighborhood in his short story collection Four New Messages. Both have a knack for dirty jokes and amusingly rendered (sometimes solo) sex, and their characters need not be likeable for us to love them anyway.
Joan Didion as Virginia Woolf
I don't know that any contemporary essayist could stand up to Virginia Woolf the way Joan Didion does. While Susan Sontag and Zadie Smith could rub shoulders with them just fine at what would possibly be the best dinner party of all time, there's a way in which Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Didion's "In Bed" and "On Keeping A Notebook" are pure songs to each other. Both have written definitive essays on place (Woolf's "Street Hauntings" about London, Didion's "Goodbye to All That" about New York), and each confronts and closely protects the hazy space between private and public life. Woolf and Didion are extraordinarily elegiac writers, whether sitting at a desk in England watching a moth die on a window sill or waiting in a Maui hotel room for a typhoon that will never arrive, both are laudably restrained and aware of limitation within the spaces they're compelled to investigate.
Rachel Kushner as F. Scott Fitzgerald
The protagonists of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers might have been great friends had they lived within the same novel. Fitzgerald's Nick and Kushner's Reno both observe more than they act, and exist at the edges of cultural movements in New York--the pre-Depression extravagance of the Long Island elite, and the art scene in a destitute 1970s Manhattan. They're narrators who watch closely enough to cast cutting--and true--dispersions. "They were careless people," Nick says of Daisy and Tom. And Reno, watching her fair-weather companion Giddle, determines that she has no true friends "since they were merely an audience to her performance." It's also worth nodding at the silly gendered reviewing The Flamethrowers received -- "a macho novel by and about women," Adam Kirsch wrote. I don't know that we'd call Fitzgerald a particularly "masculine" writer, but I've yet to hear The Great Gatsby coined a "feminine novel."
Kevin Powers as Ernest Hemingway
It's hard to read The Yellow Birds and not think of Hemingway's languid yet spare sentences and straight delivery. There's the overlapping subjects of war in Powers's acclaimed novel and in a handful of Hemingway's, perhaps most notably A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. But the authors are in conversation beyond their subjects, down to an echoic yet non-derivative cadence. While Powers's narrative unfolds a bit more digressively--we shift ahead and then back in time, being led by a narrator's thoughts more than chronology--both Hemingway and Powers's writing is highly attuned to the tactile elements of war. We're haunted by the sand of Powers's Iraq, and the pine needles of Hemingway's Spain.
Alissa Nutting as Anaïs Nin
What calls Anaïs Nin to mind so strongly when considering Alissa Nutting is less the women's writing styles than the literary world's reaction to their subjects. Both are controversial writers, and critical responses are often centered more on that controversy than the writing within the books themselves. Tampa, a sexually explicit novel about a pedophiliac 26-year-old female schoolteacher, was called by many the most controversial book of 2013. A conservative reading public had trouble with Nin's erotically charged narratives, and the feminists who might have welcomed her disagreed instead with her ideas of femininity. Both women are particularly psychological writers in their investigations of taboo sexuality--Nutting's narrator who insatiably longs for her 14-year-old students, and Nin's incestuous relationship with her father. These are two of the gutsiest women we've seen in literature, and both craft--and sometimes embody--undeniably riveting femme fatales.
|
Submit a tip

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot