Friday, April 20, 2007

"So it goes."

"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 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 that 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 here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment it gone, it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the 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 and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people,
'So it goes.'"
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-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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Take what you will from this.

1 comment:

Kat said...

I love this quote. I love Mr. Vonnegut. Thanks for posting all of these, I love them. =)