So it goes.

This is very sad.

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat’s Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

I have practically an entire bookshelf devoted to all my Vonnegut. Great writer, great man, nobody captured the wistfulness of comedy, the comic response to catastrophe, better than he.

And his last book, A Man Without A Country, was an informative and engaging collection of essays which described the absurdity of our current times with biting wit and, underneath, a real anger at these so-called patriots who took away the country he served in WWII. He could run rings around this collection of fools, and he did. He knew the suffering of war because he saw it first-hand in Dresden. He wasn't so blithe about the tragedy of human life. He laughed because there was nothing else to do.

He said it would be his last book. He was right. Kilgore Trout must have told him.

So it goes.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

-God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

UPDATE: Scouring the 'Net it occurs to me that I've finally found something that could unify the whole progressive blogosphere: they were all reading Vonnegut books in high school and college. This is a significant passage from 2003:

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs."