While spending the memorable summer of 2003 in lovely
Ithaca, New York as part of my first
academic research experience at Cornell University, I was introduced to the works of the renowned American writer
Kurt Vonnegut during a physics colloquium on carbon nanotubes given by
Professor Paul McEuen in which he made reference to ``ice-nine,'' a mythical substance in
Cat's Cradle that has the ability to instantly freeze any water in which it comes into contact with & hence is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Intrigued, I sought out Cat's Cradle then and recently finished re-reading it (which I rarely ever do with novels). Cat's Cradle, published in 1963, was Vonnegut's first big breakthrough as a writer and would later form his master's thesis in anthropology (?) at the University of Chicago. To understand Vonnegut, one really needs to understand his dreary past; while an undergraduate at Cornell he was drafted into WWII and subsequently taken prisoner by the Naazis and confined to forced labor in an underground Dresden slaughterhouse while the British & Americans firebombed the once majestic city into
oblivion in February 1945. That his life was spared & he blessed with a remarkable penchant for writing, have enabled him to not only recount the horrors of war (in a later masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five) but to scrutinize the many themes underlying modern liberal Western societies -- the nature of man's existence, the ethical responsibilities of destructive technologies, the relationship between individuality & subordination in democracy -- that suffuse his work. He has the uncanny ability to economically convey profound meaning with humor that is deeply refreshing given the circumstances of what he was made to endure & in the context of the wider genre at large. Although a profound cynic of humanity's condition, Vonnegut nevertheless aspired to find meaning in life (& by extension his writing) through simple acts of human kindness (in addition to rearing his own three children, he adopted four more among which were the three children of his sister who died prematurely of cancer). Cat's Cradle is about many things, among which are a witty, satirical diatribe of science's role in society (as relevant in the aftermath of WWII as it is now), the power of organized religion to befuddle rational thought, & the intrinsic humanistic tendency to disengage from reality with morbid consequences thereof. The strong & wide ranging emotions that the story evokes doesn't diminish with a re-reading, a true sign of its genius. Last spring, when news broke out of Kurt Vonnegut's
death (so it goes) at the age of 84, my initial melancholy gave way to subdued happiness knowing that his beautiful writings will always provide us with a lifeline to the man himself.