War, Unstuck In Time

As many of you know, Kurt Vonnegut passed away on April 11 at the age of 84 from brain injuries suffered from a recent fall in his home.

In arguably his most important book, Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut's main character Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time. This enables him to view his life and those around him in a 4-dimensional space that includes time. He can look up and down at time (his life) in any order. Here is Billy Pilgrim's description of war when one is unstuck in time.

I think it's a beautiful passage for it's simplicity, it's twisted perspective and view of war.

"American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. . . .The bombers opened their bomb-bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes.

"When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and snipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again."

Kurt Vonnegut
1922-2007
Slaughterhouse Five

And so it goes...