The first time I finished Kurt Vonnegut’s "Slaughterhouse-Five", I was listening to an Elliott Smith record. It was sometime two years ago in the winter, and I had finished reading his novel "Cat's Cradle"about a month before. I was a high school senior, and an essay on that book was my final in AP Language and Composition.
Sometimes I wish that I was Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in "Slaughterhouse-Five". And sometimes I wish I was Kilgore Trout. Neither of them are in particularly great places within their respective stories, but both come to understand something so wonderful and simple about life that I wish I could understand too. Things that I wouldn’t be able to think of without hearing it from them first. Sometimes I wish that I had lived in Kurt Vonnegut’s head, a place where I believe everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. That’s the beauty of his novels. They transport you to a different place entirely, make you think of life in a different way than you had before, simultaneously through horrific sadness and breathtaking beauty. These two things often go hand in hand.
So it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut changed my life because of Tralfamadore. Tralfamadorians are an alien race. They cannot perceive time and space like humans do, instead witnessing the past, present, and future like moments frozen in amber. They see memories and time like a landscape, long and enveloping of so many things all at once. They say that a person never really dies, because death is only just a moment. Somewhere else, in a different moment, that person is perfectly fine. Kurt Vonnegut changed my life because he taught me that bad times are only temporary. They do not last, because somewhere else, those bad times are gone and you are perfectly fine.
See, I do not have a diagnosed anxiety disorder, and do not tell people that I do. I do know, however, that I get anxious and nervous about many little things. It’s just something about me that I know for a fact. When something bad happens, it takes over my world. In these moments, I often wish that I could change whatever the problem is to be non-existent. I wish that a genie would visit me, and that one of my wishes would be to remove whatever is bothering me at that particular moment, no matter how small or trivial. When I finished reading "Slaughterhouse-Five", I was listening to Elliott Smith, a singer-songwriter notorious for his melancholy songs. He’s often categorized as “the depressing artist” because many of his songs revolve around depression, suicide, and drug abuse. I think I enjoy his music for reasons similar to why I enjoy Kurt Vonnegut. When I hear Elliott sing a song about loneliness, it makes me think about my freshman year of college. It reminds me that I’m not alone in my thoughts and that other people feel like I do sometimes. When I read "Slaughterhouse-Five", it reminded me that bad times don’t last forever.
When I think about who I was in the past, it isn’t always something I’m proud of. I’ve done a lot of things, some of them good, some of them bad. I think that’s the same for a lot of people the world over. I can look back on who I was in high school, middle school, earlier this year, or earlier this week, and I can think about them like moments frozen in amber. The present only lasts as long as the time you can remember it; it is gone in seconds. For all the time I spend worrying about who I’m going to be ten years from now, or who I used to be ten years ago, I almost always forget that it doesn’t matter in this moment because I am not there yet. There is so much road ahead of me, and somewhere down that road, I know that I’m going to be okay. Sometimes I can be sad, and that’s fine. I can see the world working all around me.
It’s all good.
