Slaughterhouse Five
Another book I read and enjoyed as a teenager and liked at least as much this time around, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children’s Crusade, A Duty Dance With Death, has held up surprisingly well, I think, in spite of its tincture of hippy-dippiness and modicum of late 60s/early 70s anti-war pedantry.
The book is sometimes described, I believe, as science fiction, primarily, I suppose, because the main character, Billy Pilgrim, becomes “unstuck in time,” and bounces around, in scene after scene, to places as spatially and temporally distant as Ilium, New York in the 1920s, to Dresden, Germany, in 1945, to the planet Tralfamadore, millions of miles of earth, sometime in the distant future.
But I think Vonnegut—or that is, Billy, writing about the Tralfamadorians—actually accurately describes the metaphysics of time.
“All moments, he says, “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.”
As three-dimensional creatures, human beings can only experience one instant at a time, so it seems like time is passing, or that we’re moving through it. If we had access to the fourth dimension, like the Tralfamadorians, we would see everything all at once, and recognize, as David Hume observed, that cause and effect exists only in our minds.
Granted, Billy Pilgrim’s abduction by space aliens is pretty far-fetched, but as I think Vonnegut is saying, not really any stranger when all is said and done than the fire-bombing deaths of 153,000 German civilians by Allied aircraft late in World War II.
So it goes.
The book is sometimes described, I believe, as science fiction, primarily, I suppose, because the main character, Billy Pilgrim, becomes “unstuck in time,” and bounces around, in scene after scene, to places as spatially and temporally distant as Ilium, New York in the 1920s, to Dresden, Germany, in 1945, to the planet Tralfamadore, millions of miles of earth, sometime in the distant future.
But I think Vonnegut—or that is, Billy, writing about the Tralfamadorians—actually accurately describes the metaphysics of time.
“All moments, he says, “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.”
As three-dimensional creatures, human beings can only experience one instant at a time, so it seems like time is passing, or that we’re moving through it. If we had access to the fourth dimension, like the Tralfamadorians, we would see everything all at once, and recognize, as David Hume observed, that cause and effect exists only in our minds.
Granted, Billy Pilgrim’s abduction by space aliens is pretty far-fetched, but as I think Vonnegut is saying, not really any stranger when all is said and done than the fire-bombing deaths of 153,000 German civilians by Allied aircraft late in World War II.
So it goes.
posted by Professor Dave at 11:04 AM
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