Ending The Endless

Not being able to fully appreciate what life has given you, the sweet and the sour, and at the same time appreciate and fully attend what is happening in the present moment, is the repetitive fault of every human life. As I write this entry I’m waiting for my mother to arrive in a couple of minutes with my delicious dinner, from my favorite Italian restaurant. As I think of this event, I realize that in a couple of hours, after I’ve finished my food, I will not even remember how anxious and impatient I once was for my dinner. Being in this extreme futuristic state of mind is usually unhealthy. Living in the future is not a good idea to enjoy a truly happy state of mind. This is what Kurt Vonnegut shows us in the last two chapters of his novel, Slaughterhouse Five. As the narrator reflects on the conclusions an extra-terrestrial community has come up with, his mind races to know how truthfully happy he has been and if he could be able to live with the eternal repetition of his life’s good moments. “If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still- if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 74) This is a different kind of eternity than the one we can extract from Gilgamesh, which narrates the eternity of one’s actions. Here we can see an eternity of the mind, a process by which you are able to control your present actions by the thought of having to live those events forever.

Being conscious of how the present becomes your past in a second by second basis, you target your life to be the most passionate and richly wonderful possible, so you become the most fulfilled and wise human being you can be. As Billy realizes the state of the horses which are transporting some of the American prisoners of war through the destructed Dresden, we are able to approach Vonnegut’s mind in an understanding manner. “When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn't cried about anything else in the war.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 70) It is truly difficult to accept something like this, when you just lived a massacre of the dimensions of Dresden, you can’t understand how a human being only cares for some horses. There is more empathy for the animals than for the humans. This may be a defense mechanism to protect himself from the human horror. This brings me to my next conclusion about Billy, he isn’t completely cognizant of what he has lived and is too concerned with living in the never-ending repetition of events to be accepting of his present. Billy doesn’t notice anything, he is just there to live it. There is no other way to understand war in a positive attitude than to accept it as something that we just had to live, a terrible fate of sorts.

Allowing oneself to explore the limits of our minds, and the capabilities of our soul to appreciate what we are living and all of the positive events that make us up is one of the crucial pieces to be in a relaxed and accepting state of mind. There is always a necessary step to not take things too personally, it isn’t that the universe is against an individual being, but that there is a strong tendency to take our spirit into a quest to find ourselves and ultimately be able to live in a moment by moment basis, as the following maxim describes. “Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones-to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by. ” (Vonnegut, Pg. 69) Fate is a strong character at the end of this novel. Fate is the messenger which lets us know that it is our task, and our task only, to try to live in the greatest state of mind we can possibly obtain with effort, discipline and acute awareness, ultimately finding a balance between our sealed past, our live present and our ripening future.