It has been a depressing week overall. Not counting the work I have done (or the lack of it). Then, as Jon Stewart put it right, the world got a lot greyer and little less interesting. I guess I must be in the wrong generation or something. Sometimes reality just sucks. How much ever you are a realist (or a pessimist as my significant other would put it) you would refuse to believe death would not come to all. Especially to someone like Kurt Vonnegut.
In the aftermath of the V-Tech shootings, I was wondering about the purpose of existence (when I should be working). It struck me that the most significant feeling I had was apathy. I guess I got it before anyone else gets it after a year or so except the families of the victims for whom the world would seem a lot less interesting to live in anymore. So it goes…
One thing which is resonant of the book, Slaughterhouse-Five which I can connect with the shootings: The Tralfamadorians who live in four dimension, the fourth one being time, which gives them the ability to travel in their past or future of their lives. As Vonnegut says, “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 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 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 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, which is ‘So it goes…’“
So that’s the word.
PS: The last time I posted was in December 2006. I am such a slacker
