Something that I rarely do, and yet it’s not that I have never seen an image of the man before: Without immediate immersion in the story, I think upon the dustjacket of Slaughterhouse Five.
Kurt Vonnegut. The name itself is visceral. Aside from just the gut, the K, the V, the G and Ts are hard-edge, cutting sounds. I half expect the images McCarthy draws. The photo of the man is a bit disturbing; a young Mark Twain on drugs. This is appearance only, and opinion only. And imagination truly. But it forms a preface even to the preface of this intrigueing thought:
"The British mathematician Stephen Hawking, in his 1988 best seller A Brief History of Time, found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But the future is child’s play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead. Mary O’Hare is a widow now." (Slaughterhouse-Five, p. xi)
So then, the future is known; it is only a question of time in when we learn it. Just like trigonometry; a mystery until it changes into knowledge. I love this thought.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology