On the front page of nytimes.com tonight is the obituary of Kurt Vonnegut, novelist, playwright, poet. It seems that I must be one of the last people on Earth to have not yet read a Vonnegut novel, but I was struck by the dark and somehow inspirational beauty of this final passage of his poem Requiem.

From Requiem, A Man Without a Country:

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
'It is done."
People did not like it here.