Gore Vidal - a Tribute

I came to know about Gore Vidal's writing from his non fiction book titled United States: Essays 1952 - 1992. It was a borrowed book from my local library. His writing was clear, erudite and written with sharp observations and without fear. During the time of increasingly more global turmoils and misplaced paranoia, especially after 2001, this writer who had literary honesty and universal vision in his core, was not to be sidelined by yellow journalism masqueraded as benevolent subjugation. By the time he was well in his late 70s and approaching 80s, Gore Vidal came out with some of the most pointed articles of the time to describe what the wars and violence are really about and its devastating effects on forgotten victims, the casualty of wars.

Gore Vidal died today, July 31, 2012. The world has lost one of its greatest freethinkers, literary critiques, and novelists. He understood the cosmic significance and albeit insignificance of human existence, and said even in his last years: "Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here.  Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all."

In his memoir "Point to Point Navigation", Gore Vidal reminisced last few words of his long time companion Howard Austen from deathbed: "Didn't it go awfully fast?" and the writer replied, "Of course it had. We had been too happy and the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals."

Gore Vidal, a great writer of our time, will be missed.

His obituaries can be found from the following links:

  1. Gore Vida, celebrated author, playwright, dies
  2. Gore Vidal, 1925-2012 - Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer 
  3. Gore Vidal dies; imperious gadfly and prolific, graceful writer was 86

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