By Eric Kohn

As a visual encapsulation of grief, the mass of flowers left outside the late Kurt Vonnegut’s home on E. 48th Street between Second and Third Avenues the day after his passing last Wednesday was an immense understatement.

Vonnegut, who lived 84 productive years, probably would’ve liked that; the satirist  favored terse-yet-poignant declarations over extensive hyperbolic rhetoric. While Vonnegut’s best known catchphrase is “So it goes” from Slaughterhouse-Five, you can open to any given passage in the library of his work to witness such quick-witted jabs at the fallibility of human nature. His magically absurd observations tapped into the tragedy and ephemeral quality of life with caustic hilarity and tempestuous hollers in the darkness of modern times.

Vonnegut became a best-selling author in the ’70s, but his message wasn’t lost on later readers. “I hereby declare you ‘Generation A,’ as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago,” he told a class of graduates at Syracuse University in 1994. “I apologize for the terrible mess the planet is in,” he added. “But it has always been a mess.”