Slaughterhouse Five

Ever since I taught Slaughterhouse Five a few years ago and then taught a Vonnegut elective in Bulgaria, I've had his books on my mind. I had never bothered to read them before, as I continue to foolishly fail to recognize that well-known books are often so because they are great to read. I completely fell in love with Vonnegut in a strange way. Something about his writing strikes me as so unabashedly human and honest in a unique way. And in spite of his quasi-pessimism, I find the philosophy in his books very comforting and almost hopeful.

Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut

This is one of my favorite things from any KV novel that I've read thus far:

"It would take another Earthling to explain it to you. Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided. I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber."

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug my shoulders and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'"

I hope that I am able to explicate my reaction to that well enough that the sentiment comes off not callous but hopeful and comforting. I read this book after I graduated college, again in Morocco, and again in Bulgaria. Each time I read it, I was moving forward from significant places in life and leaving behind a lot of people and experiences that I really loved and cherished. While some of those people remained in my life, things weren't the same - as they never are. By nature, I'm very nostalgic and things like that often make me sad, but after I read this book, it made it much easier for me to move on and accept change. I'm now able to pause myself when I have a nostalgic moment or longing for a past person or relationship or experience. I remind myself that whatever it is still is just as real as it ever was back somewhere else along that mountain range. It encourages me to remember things vividly but it is separate from longing or dwelling in the past. It is helping me to create that mountain range in my mind to be as real and solid as possible. The more I do that, the more calm I feel about going into the future, it is easier to accept change, and it allows me to acknowledge feelings I have for things that are no longer part of my reality today. I can allow myself to feel the full love I felt for that person at the time that I loved them and separate it from my feelings today. I don't need to feel that today because it still exists at the time; I don't have to carry it forward with me. So it's also a release of baggage and unnecessary attachments.

While I am so lucky that the people I love the most are all alive and well, someday I will probably have to deal with my parents dying before me and, though hopefully not, potentially someone else I love dearly. Though I will certainly feel devastated and sad and will mourn the future moments that we can't share, I am confident that this will help me move forward and feel comfortable doing so. I will know that being happy in the future and letting go of that sadness slowly will not be to diminish their lives and importance to me. I'll just look across that broad stretch of the mountain range of life and see all those moments in which they were and are and always will be. No future event can ever change those moments, and no death can erase all the moments of life that preceded it.

There is so much more I could and would love to say about this book, but of everything, this is the one that sticks with me the most and that has fundamentally changed the way I see the world and my life.