Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007)

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhause Five was one of the great american novels of the twentieth century. The book was semi-autobiographical, written about the defining moment in his life, when he witnessed the firebombing of Dresden in World War II as a POW. In the book, his alter-ego is Billy Pilgrim, a would be author who gets unstuck in time and starts reliving the various moments in his life, including his death. In the book, Vonnegut ruminates on death:

[quote]Billy was working on his second letter, when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this:

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfalmadore 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 the funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.

The Tralfalmadorians can look at all the diffrerent 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 Tralfalmadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition at that particular moment, but that the same person is fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself
hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfalmadorians say about dead people, which is....SO IT GOES"

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. SO IT GOES....

Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died too. SO IT GOES....

And every day my government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. SO IT GOES...

My father died many years ago now-- of natural causes. SO IT GOES.... He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut too. He left me his guns. They rust.

On Tralfalmadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfalmadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin-- who taught that
those who die are meant to die. That corpses are improvements. SO IT GOES....

The same general idea appears in "The Big Board" by Kilgore Trout. The flying saucer creatures who capture Trout's hero ask him about Darwin. They also ask him about golf.

If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfalmadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to
be, I am not overjoyed. Still-- if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.

And so it goes [/quote]

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at age 84. He was said to be amazed that he lived that long, considering he was a heavy smoker all his life. He probably wouldn't want people grieving over his death. After all, if he has relived the moments of his life many times, he has already seen his death many times. Right now he is probably back in Dresden, or maybe he's writing Cat's Cradle or Breakfast of Champions again. Or reliving the various moments in a life filled with liberal political activism.

Death is just one moment. Kurt Vonnegut has died. And so it goes...