Newsweek has a letter, written by Kurt Vonnegut and dated May 29, 1945, from a new collection of the late authors writings entitled Armageddon in Retrospect. The letter details his time as a P.O.W., which would become the basis for his most famous work: Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death.

On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.

After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.

Reading the letter in its entirety it was interesting to note that, even in his personal correspondences, he employed the repeating “tics” that can be called a hallmark of his work.

Slaughterhouse 1945 [Newsweek] : growabrain

Christie’s, the auction house dealing almost exclusively in amazing things that I will never be able to afford, will be offering up a mouthwatering prize for the Victorian-era enthusiast striving for the ultimate in authentic furnishings for their study; namely the desk once owned by Charles Dickens on which he wrote Great Expectations The proceeds of the auction, to be held in June, will be going to the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, which the desk was gifted to by Jeanne–Marie Dickens, Countess Wenckheim. The desk is expected to fetch between £50,000-£80,000, or eight hundred billion American dollars.

Certainly such a price is a trifle when one imagines the value in being able to sit snug in their meticulously reconstructed office, taking nib in hand to inscribe intricately constructed sentences overflowing with poetic prose, running on and on — seemingly forever — a vast torrent of elegant, meandering descriptors, strung together with a delicate chain of commas and semicolons wending their way through a variety of subjects and encompassing the expansive gulf of human emotion in its brilliant and contradictory entirety and in doing so, laying out a map of the societal landscape, a grid work of people’s interactions with other people and the effects of these interpersonal relationships in regards to society especially in terms of the class system which, regardless of how much man has progressed, has yet to be exorcised completely — and indeed in some ways has become even worse — the gully between the wealthy and poor becoming akin to an awesome canyon; a canyon filled with a deep morass of misery and despair from which the destitute can only struggle helplessly glancing upwards on occasion to see the rich, the masters of this brave, new, industrialized world looking down upon them, greedy sneers curling their lips as they watch the less fortunate desperately try to raise themselves up, while only pushing others down further into the muck until they themselves become worn-out, weary, and weak and the next struggling body comes along to begin the whole process again; a twisted and deliberate cycle perpetrated by those on high, licking their lips at the spectacle laid out before them, a spectacle from which only they reap the rewards but at the cost of their eternal souls.

A small price to pay indeed.

Press Release [Christie’s] : The Victorian Peeper