Here and there in my 47+ years on this earthly plain, my path has intersected with individuals of varying renown. As a lad, I was introduced to former Vice President Hubert Humphrey by my uncle at Miami International Airport. During my first year of college, I attended a concert by jazz legend Count Basie and shook his hand afterwards. Several years later, at a gathering in Washington, DC sponsored by the anti-nuclear group SANE, I chatted with famed pediatrician (and activist) Dr. Benjamin Spock. In the mid-1980s, while in graduate school at Brown University, I met actress Jane Fonda while helping to move her daughter Vanessa into her dormitory room. And a decade and a half later, I lived in the same apartment building in Northampton, Massachusetts as literary icon—and, at the time, visiting professor at Smith College—Kurt Vonnegut. Strangely, although there were occasional moments in which I managed to lay eyes on Mr. Vonnegut, we never formally met. And we never shall:

Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84

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.

Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz.

Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,â€? Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,â€? “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.â€?….

The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,� Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.� It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.�

His experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five,� which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, “so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.�

To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,� summed up his philosophy:

“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.’ � [full text]

Over the years, I have read several of Mr. Vonnegut’s books, including his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five. They all seemed infused with a certain pathos and idealistic pessimism. I suspect that, though he may have yearned and argued for a kinder and more just world, Mr. Vonnegut never held out much hope for such. Perhaps the suicide of his mother and the horrors he witnessed in World War Two forever colored his worldview. How could they not?

And how could I not have met this man, with whom I feel a certain kinship? I know what it is to imagine the world the way it could be and to see it the way it is, to hold out hope yet feel hopeless, to desire and despair. I know what it is to strive to make meaning of the seemingly meaningless, to give voice to the conflicts within and without, to do something—anything!—that matters. In the end, I would like to believe that Kurt Vonnegut made a difference in this tattered world, if for no other reason than he resisted silence and spoke out in the best way he knew how. I suppose that is all any of us can do.

Rest in peace, kind sir.