#slaughterhouse5

Sunset in Langkawi, Malaysia 🇲🇾

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” - Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

Graves of probable victims of the British-American bombing raids, 13-15 February 1945, that killed an estimated 25,000 people.

It has a much more abrupt ending than I remembered. I guess that’s part of the point, there never really is a resolution.

I re-read it after one of my friends mentioned that he did and he found it was much more interesting than before. He had matured. So I decided to too.

Reflecting on when I first read it, I was utterly convinced that part of the novella was about religion and how Billy Pilgrim’s Tralfamadore experiences were his method of coping with the horror of wars. His beliefs resulting from his experiences grew to be his way of life, his way of understanding life, his religion.

Reading this again, I still see that, but not particularly about religion so much as the struggle to understand life. Earthlings have an issue as to the big ole question “Why?” when Tralfamadorians just accept that things are always they are, have been, and will be.

More than that though, I realized that this is the book that has informed my own beliefs, inadvertently. I didn’t know it had affected me so much when I was a sophomore student in high school. And honestly, maybe it didn’t, but it sounds awfully similar to my belief in moments.

We are all bugs in amber.

The only difference is that I do believe in free will, although it seems as though Tralfamadorians definitely would not agree

Anyways, these singular moments, so obnoxiously important and yet so trivial in the grand scheme of things. This isn’t from the book now, and my analysis is straying…

Anyways, every moment, we’re just trying to get by…

“…each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message–describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."

To me, this echoes of how I want to be able to see people, that they are so much more complex than what they are in the current moment, but the sum of so many millions of things happening at once. But for me, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end, there are definitely causes and effects. It is the connections of all these causes and effects that ultimately lead to one point in time that astounds me. And how this singular point in time can mean so much more later on.

Like how the simple act of my parents lending me the car enabled me to go to the A Community of Friends’ Open House where I was able to talk to the CEO and get contacts to help set up that partnership between Bruin Seeds and ACOF. So many other things had to happen for the collision and collaborations to happen.

40 years later, and the anti-glacier books are being written in batches. There are some pro-glaciers books, too, and we’ve been getting about-glaciers books recently. To make sure the future generations know what glaciers were.