Appropriate for Easter... about another hero of mine, and his love of Christ.

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Next to the Sermon on the Mount, the words Vonnegut quotes most often in his work were spoken by his fellow Hoosier, Eugene V. Debs, while running for president on the Socialist Party ticket: “While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I am not free.” In Timequake, Vonnegut called those words “a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount.” He quoted them again as an epigraph to his novel Hocus Pocus, which he dedicated to the memory of Debs, “a Socialist and a Pacifist and a labor organizer.”

Vonnegut found another “echo of the Sermon on the Mount” in the work of Mark Twain. In a talk he gave on the hundredth anniversary of the completion of Mark Twain’s “fanciful house in Hartford, Connecticut,” Vonnegut declared himself “a skeptic of the divinity of Christ…confirmed of my skepticism by Mark Twain in my formative years.” He then cited these words of the author as “a profoundly Christian statement, an echo of the Beatitudes:”

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When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river….

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“The river, of course, is life,” Vonnegut said. “Mark Twain is saying what Christ said in so many ways: that he could not help loving anyone in the midst of life.”

[imagejournal.org]