7 months ago
20
The meaning of life, in a short verse.
“Don’t make stuff because you want to make money — it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous — because you will never feel famous enough,” John Green advised aspiring writers. “If you worship money and things … then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth,” David Foster Wallace admonished in his timeless commencement address on the meaning of life. But what does it really mean to “have enough?”
There is hardly a better answer than the one implicitly given by Kurt Vonnegut — man of discipline, champion of literary style, modern sage, one wise dad — in a poem he wrote for The New Yorker in May of 2005, reprinted in John C. Bogle’s Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life (public library):
JOE HELLER
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!
Complement with Vonnegut on how to write with style, the writer’s responsibility and the limitations of the brain, the shapes of stories, his daily routine, his heart-warming advice to his children, and his favorite erotic illustrations.
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