Everything Is Inevitable
Mn
Monuments | 15 Aug 2007 | 7 Comments | Share this...
“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.”
Been pretty much bathing in smelly old Vonnegut pages (basically all the books with 70’s style pop art with the big V on the front), and I can feel my brain melting some old, long-held dogmas. My girlfriend and I have bitched at each other endlessly over many a topic - mostly it’s about some form of religious stuffings. My angle was that I never believed in fate or destiny before, mostly because the words seem too loosely defined. Most definitions imply someone or something is guiding an outcome, which I can’t really stomach. Maybe we can scratch both words, and just call it inevitability. The cause of my recent dogma shift is Vonnegut’s explanation of time - that maybe what we refer to as “now” is an illusion.
The quote from Slaughterhouse Five that has repeatedly comforted me through two of the most powerfully tragic events of my life - my best friend dying in a car accident at 16 and the damn towers i worked in crumbling (i watched both “events") - is an excerpt of a letter Billy Pilgrim writes addressed to the public about his new understanding of time (taught to him by alien abductors called Tralfamadorians):
“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 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 Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that 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 “Tralfamdorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’”
I could go on forever about this, but it seems rather likely to me that this is right...and if there is no “now”, there aren’t really decisions, just sets of conditions at any given “moment” in time and space that dictate what will happen - your character, your physiology, your relationships, the wind, the temperature, the air pressure, the house/apt you’re in, what you’re wearing, what you look like, what you’re eating, and on, and on, and on - all acting in concert to form only one possible outcome to an event. It means everything is inevitable.
Sadly, and maybe it’s because I’m too impressionable, I can’t tell if I’m being intentionally manipulated by him, or if he really believes this stuff...either way, I’m upside down...and I love it…
check out this article. time, in general, is an abstraction that makes living our lives in this world feasible. there is no physical law that states that time can only move forward. outside of getting to work “on time” and getting a reasonable amount of sleep, how you want to look at it is totally up to you.
from the article:
“Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. Most of us tend to think of time the way Newton did: ‘Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external.’ But as Einstein proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.”
also, i haven’t read near the amount of vonnegut that you have, but i don’t think he ever wrote anything that he didn’t at least believe was possible. he wasn’t trying to “intentionally manipulate” anyone—just show them all possiblities.
Adam | 15 Aug 2007 | 10:43 am