A five-minute writing lesson from Kurt Vonnegut, the Mark Twain of our lifetimes. So it goes. (Thanks Open Culture.)

A 1970 Vonnegut commencement address, as covered by Time magazine:

“Like his novels, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s message to the graduating class of Bennington College was by turns desolately winsome, merely bleak and utterly but almost gaily despondent. Confessing to congenital pessimism, Vonnegut told the graduates: ‘Everything is going to become unimaginably worse and never get better again.’

Still, Vonnegut had some suggestions: ‘We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us. But only in superstition is there hope. I beg you to believe in the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrater of the grandest dreams of God Almighty. If you can believe that and make others believe it, human beings might stop treating each other like garbage.’

Vonnegut also asked the graduates to take advantage of some of youth’s prerogatives. A ‘great swindle of our time,’ he said, ‘is that people your age are supposed to save the world. I was a graduation speaker at a little preparatory school for girls on Cape Cod a couple of weeks ago. I told the girls that they were much too young to save the world and that after they got their diplomas, they should go swimming and sailing and walking, and just fool around.'”