More Reasons I love Kurt Vonnegut

I've been slowly collecting and reading Vonnegut's works, and so far, my favorites of his are Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Mother Night, and A Man Without a Country. I’ve been slowly collecting his works—he’s one of those authors where each book builds on concepts and themes he introduced in previous or other books of his. Motifs such as anti-war sentiments, absurdism, and irony layer in each ridiculous character he introduces, and I eat it up every time. I will be honest and say not every book of his has been a hit with me. I was indifferent to Welcome to the Monkey House and Breakfast of Champions. But I’m a huge fan of him, so I enjoyed building my understanding of his thoughts and sentiments. So here are quotes of his that I think about to this day.

If I were to talk about the significance of these books and quotes in my life in detail, we would be here all day—so I’ll talk about Slaughterhouse-Five in particular. When my grandpa was in the hospital, I kept thinking about this quote of Vonnegut impulsively. To be more specific, the concept of time in the context of Tralfamadorian beliefs. They believe that time is not linear, and laugh at humans who box themselves into the concept of certain moments having more importance than others because of when they take place. To Tralfamadorians, what matters is that most of the moments in a person's life are enjoyable. Moments don’t come and go or follow one another like “beads on a string”—they exist in tandem with one another. This thought brought me a lot of comfort in a time of mental turmoil and seeing my grandpa like that. I have so many memories of my grandpa making me pancakes, packing my lunch as a kid, coming up with bedtime stories on the fly, and telling them to me as he lay on his back in my room with a Garfield pillow behind his head. Why should one focus on the last moments?

Ultimately, my grandpa is recovering, but one can't expect everything to go back to "normal" after. But I’m glad that there are more moments to come, and that all of the moments I have with him—and that he has—will exist together: past, present, and future.