Many Versus A Lot

Perfect synonyms are almost impossible to find, words may have a similar definition, yet they have a different effect on the reader and on the whole written outcome. We can see this in David Crystal’s blog On Many, where he shows us how the word “many” has a different use than the word “a lot” depending on the subject you are talking about and the nouns accompanying the modifier. A correspondent asked him, “Does many actually refer to a different number from a lot of?” (David Crystal, On Many) to which David responded that there are different cases in which you can use these words without making the tone change between the modifier and the noun. The use of many in situations such as many hybrid cars gives a notion that is, “perhaps a mite too downmarket for an upmarket quantifier, as would be many hiccups, many flutters (on the races), and so on, where one of the lot constructions would be the usual quantifier.” (David Crystal, On Many) This ends up being in a discussion of the tone of each word and how it affects the reader and the overall tone of the written piece in a specific way when written beside other words. The choice of using a word is something you acquire as you explore the language through its history and the use of each independent word which changes between the different cultures and regions. The flow of the sentences, the overall outcome is what matters, not the independent words. Think of a recipe, each ingredient adds something special and unique, in more than one way, to the overall dish.

Understanding The Misunderstood

Have you ever felt that this hour took years to pass? Or that the weekend was just a couple of minutes? Time makes sense to those who understand that it won’t make sense at all, for those who are prepared to not know. This is what I was thinking as I read Chapter 5 of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, in which the Tralfamadorians (creatures of another planet who are able to see time as a complete repertoire of events instead of living each independent event) see human beings as, “great millipedes with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 31) This shows a different kind of game that time plays with us, not being able to see an event as a moment but just as part of a film, a lifetime film. This book is filled up with these events and descriptions that play with our appreciation and understanding of a natural yet mysterious thing such as time.

Kurt continues this chapter by describing the art of these living beings where, “There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 31) Showing how all of this society is motivated by a type of impressionism, this love for seeing beautiful moments with no motivation, purpose or sequence makes them a society I had never even thought of. In the first chapters of the book I thought the author was trying to describe his personal utopia, but as I continued reading the book I changed my understanding of the whole purpose of the piece which in my mind has ended up being in his narrating of a story that has no purpose or sequence, a writer writing on his own writing with the goal of exploring the “depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time” in this case, the life of Billy Pilgrim.

Making fun out of a life tragedy isn’t that easy to do, this is how I explain the importance of the Flying Saucer and the Tralfamadorians in the book. They simply make it fun and disorganized, meeting all of the necessary requirements: be very far away from earth so no one will link them with anything they’ve seen or believed in, make them different from all existing creatures so you don’t feel attached or partial towards them in any way, and the most important of all, make them easy to manipulate and make a novel out of them. The character of the narrator is ever-changing between two formats. First, it is in narrating mode to tell us of what Billy feels and does as we see in the following maxim. “She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 37) Tragic Billy is necessary for us to get the true message, he serves as an example of a soul that never found any passionate goal or reason for life. The second narrating format is message mode in which we are told what to do to not follow Billy’s path. “That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 42) The author teaches his common sense philosophy through the mouth of strange extraterrestrials because humans are so disconnected from their central source of wisdom, nature, that they have lost their ability to navigate their limited time with wisdom and humor.

Living In Amber

As the reader ventures through Chapter 4 of Slaughtehouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, it is difficult to determine the intentions and true meaning of the ideas in the book and their effects on Billy, the main character of the novel. We can see this in the conversation between Billy and the Tralfamadorians as they take him in the night of his daughter’s wedding to Tralfamadore. When he asks them why did they choose him over the other humans they respond, “Because this moment simply is.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 28) confirming the conclusions I exposed in my previous post, which explains the hopelessness of Billy due to the impossibility of him believing that he can decide, and that his decisions will build up to create his future. This feeling of having everything already decided, the powerlessness and futility of it all, is what I believe was the main cause of his alcoholism, his despair, and his sleeping disorders.

As we are introduced with the flying saucer of the Tralfamadorians, and all of the stolen furniture they have to make Billy comfortable, it is difficult not to question the purpose of having these strange creatures in the book. Are they supposed to make us feel identified with some of their ideas? Are they connected in some way, or serve as an explanation for the atrocities of World War II? These questions are not answered in the chapter but they have built up with hundreds of other questions about these creatures from previous chapters. Destiny and free-will are questioned incessantly: “I've visited thirty-one inhabited plants in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 31) This distancing from the belief of free-will, which has served to create nations such as the United States, where independent choices and the right to pursue one’s own happiness are believed to be essential for every human being is in direct contradiction with this book. We are destined to be and change our social and economical levels not because of our decisions or any laws we have created and believe in, but simply because it just is. We are not living our lives, life is living itself out through us. We are just its robot puppets.

As Billy asks himself how did he get into this world inside the flying saucer of the Tralfamadorians, they answer that that’s for humans to understand but that what is really important is to know that what they are like bugs in amber. “Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 31) The frozen rigidness of that description is astounding, the amber being life itself, we stuck in it, no way forward, no way out. Will all these explanations and descriptions end up having any similarity with any previous philosophical concept of life? Who or what decides this everlasting anthology of events and what is the final purpose of our world, of our individual lives? Nihilism, the belief that nothing has any value seems to permeate Vonnegut’s soul. A secure formula to sink us, not into amber but into chronic depression.

Serenity, Courage And Wisdom

In Billy, the main character of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, we see a person who is absolutely hopeless due to the low range of possibilities in his life, since he believes, he is living in what has happened in his past, what is happening in his present, and what will happen in his future. Vonnegut makes this character completely unmotivated about his life in a way that makes the book have a motor of its own kind. By having an all-knowing narrator, the author gives us the opportunity to gain a complete description of his character, in bits and pieces, as he travels through time, and at the same time know more than what the character perceives about his surroundings.

We can see this in Chapter 3, where Vonnegut shows the positive side of his character’s depression as he describes the following quote on one of Billy’s office walls. “GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE, COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN, AND WISDOM ALWAYS TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 22) With this the author mentions that this mentality has helped Billy to go on through his disastrous life, which has no clear objective or purpose. Vonnegut also tells us in a quick and painless way that, “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present and the future.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 22) which gives the reader all the information he needs to know, that Billy is in his condition due to the impossibility to do what a human being is normally frightened and yet empowered to do: to choose between different options and thus be an active creator of his life. Not being able to forget the past or be scared of the future gives Billy no point in doubting what his decisions might guide him into. Being frightened of what is to come, is a small thing compared to the depression a human being must feel when being convinced that any decision he or she makes will have no effect on their life, that all decisions have already been made. It’s a forced fate at its worst. Life not as an adventure but as a life sentence.

At the end of the chapter, Vonnegut gives us the chance to reconsider our position on the condition of the character, who is not only having dreams of how his life was and how it is going to be, but of a strange group of people that have changed his life, up to what we know, in a way that can’t be positive. “Billy Pilgrim nestled like a spoon with the hobo on Christmas night, and he fell asleep, and he traveled in time to 1967 again- to the night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from Tralfamadore.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 26) Vonnegut exposes how Billy is living as a prisoner of war in Germany and being kidnapped at the same time by the “Trafalmadorians” in the same chain of thought, without making the reader jump. This shows us how his narrator is absolutely effective in convincing us of Billy Pilgrim’s story, and gets us hooked for the next chapter, which is promising new stories and details that have in multiple occasions radically transformed our point of view on the objective of the book, in only three chapters. Vonnegut is definitely a unique master story teller that forces the reader to think and re-analyze constantly. This kind of book keeps you on your toes, on high alert and opens one’s appetite for more.

Giving In

Hallucination, in my opinion is the result of oppressed dreams and desperate solutions one’s mind creates in response to our life dilemmas. We can see this in the character Billy, of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Billy, an optometrist who fought in the Second World War, is obsessed on telling the world about a group of people called Tralfamadorians who have interesting conclusions about death and time. For example, the say that dead beings are “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.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 9-10) This shows a different kind of immortality I had never considered, it isn’t that one’s actions stay on earth as the story of our world and the effect we had on it, both positive and negative, but the moment to moment immortality, the never-ending movie of the same moment that is somehow stored in the universe. Quantum physicists have concluded that time does not exist. From this, we can conclude that Vonnegut is showing how his character, Billy, is trying to find a reason for how people come and go, changing his tragedies for an all encompassing concept, that may sound like a hallucination but may in fact be true, even if it is difficult for our minds to grasp the idea in its entirety. Science fiction always sounded hallucinatory when originally published, to later become prophetic of real scientific discoveries and truths.

Due to his situation, the loss of his wife, the plane crash of which he was the only one to survive and the war he lived, he needs an answer to the destiny of the people who left and if he will ever see them again. Following this logic he creates the following description of life after death. “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a 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 Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”” (Vonnegut, Pg. 10) Once I heard that the only thing that’s sure is that one is going to die, for so, this extremist point of view has a basic idea, to understand death as a natural thing that shouldn’t influence the living beings, since their were many other moments where this death didn’t exist. We don’t just see this in Billy’s words but in his actions too, as he gives us a strange and different approach to his wife’s death.

Being able to overcome difficult situations is probably the hardest thing a human being has to do, being able to do so as Billy does is absolutely astounding. But this makes Billy a sad person, who, through Vonnegut’s descriptions appears as the suicidal people I talked about in my last blog. In the following maxim, Billy is being rescued from the deepest part of a swimming pool where his father is trying to teach him to swim by the method of “sink or swim”. “He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 16) Being convinced that life would never be good for him, that he would never have joy, young Billy feels he is destined to die, but in a way what Vonnegut shows, is that we are all destined to live and learn through suffering since we already know we are destined to die. We each must still find meaning to this journey even if it has an inevitable ending. We each need to use death as an advisor not send death inappropriate early invitations.

Requirements To Become A Pillar Of Salt

There is always a moment of surrender in a human being. There is a necessity to look at what has been done and what is to come. It is an obligation of every human being to surrender to absurd, unfair, insane realities either lived or shared vicariously and learn how to leave behind the painful past. We can vividly see this through the words of Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. “The Second World War had certainly made everybody very tough.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 4) As the narrator answers Nancy, the writer of a story he was reporting for Chicago City News Bureau, that he has seen “lots worse than that” of a case of a man that got trapped with an elevator door while he was inside his car getting smashed with the roof, we can see how horrendous war is for veterans. Not being able to talk to somebody leads people who have lived untold horrors for others security to take refuge in alcohol or suicide or become part of the living dead. I remember a tragedy that occurred here in Bogota many years ago where a man, who was a Vietnam/Korean vet, walked into a busy Italian restaurant, owned by some friends and proceeded to shoot at everybody and then committed suicide. It was not enough to have suffered war but be changed forever, become mentally ill and push yourself and others to an unimaginable horror and to an early grave.

As I studied the Holocaust in 7th grade English with Mrs. Leonard, something that caught my attention because I didn’t understand how it could be possible, was the idea that a group of modern people thought and persuaded others to believe that the Holocaust didn’t exist. It is offending and unconscious to even think of using your time to influence other people to believe that something of that level of horror and ignorance never happened. There is plenty of media, physical proof and survivors of the Holocaust, who amazingly continue fighting in a peaceful and conscious way, something not many could even dream of doing. “The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 4) These people Vonnegut talks about are those human beings we see and we hear about that amaze us into seeing how extremely brave and inspiring we humans can be. The lives and qualities of superior human beings such as Buda, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Oscar Arias Sanchez and Jesus are universally inspiring.

In the last lines of Chapter 1, we see how the veteran’s voice is swallowed by overwhelming grief and sorrow and how the stories he recounts apply to himself, an alcoholic repressed being that has no one to talk to. He did as Job’s woman did and looked back at what he had seen, done and lived, becoming a pillar of salt, and a conscious one at that. “People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 8) What takes us to look back is a factor, in my opinion of the very nature of the human being, who is in a way possessed to look back, to understand, to think, to learn, obsess and to grieve. We constantly risk becoming frozen by our past by moving it into the present with all that old, dead luggage leaving little room for a fresh, vibrant and hopeful present and future. Instead of learning from all our pasts with a huge grain of salt, wisdom and humor in our pockets, we risk becoming a dead pillar of infertile salt.

Continuing The Master’s Work

If I were to read the two remaining books of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, I would expect some kind of transformation in the relationship between the writer Dante and the character Dante. I have been told that all three books end with a mention to the stars which may be a reference to the nature of humans to appreciate and see themselves and their lives reflected in other creations of God. Also the idea that the destiny of our souls after death will depend on our closeness with those stars, the godly, the celestial. “My guide and I came on that hidden road to make our way back into the bright world; and with no care for any rest, we climbed – he first, I following – until I saw, through a round opening, some of those things of beauty heaven bears. It was from there that we emerged, to see – once more – the stars.” (Inferno XXXIV: 133-139) Something I just noticed as I read this maxim is that there are several references in these lines that must have to do with the other books.

The first one is the “hidden road” which may be the road between human sin and God’s mercy. Through the book, Dante repeats the idea of permanent punishment, we can see this as we pass through limbo which is destined for: “those who were worthy but lived before Christianity and/or without baptism… Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan.” (Inferno IV) which tells us that not many souls are able to change their place after death. Not many will see those stars again and the most important fact, for our purpose, none will make their way through to reach that “hidden road”. This makes it clear that it’s not likely that we will see these characters again, as we move on we will have a new batch of adventures. This also gives importance and power to the character Dante, which will probably change through the other books. I wouldn’t bet that the people we will meet in Purgatorio and Paradiso will look at Dante in the way we saw him through the circles of hell where the souls were bewildered by Dante being alive in hell.

As the reader journeys through Inferno there is a constant search in his mind to understand the geographical world Dante’s journey is taking place in. As I searched through Wikipedia, my friends blogs, and on several educational websites I analyzed there was a geographical connection between the three books. Hell, according to Dante was created by the fall of Satan from heaven which displaced the land, creating a mountain in an island on the other side of the world which became purgatory. This theory of Dante’s Universe agrees with the diagram “The Universe of Dante” in my edition of the book and the “round opening” Dante talks about in Canto XXXIV. This connection gives place to an important difference between Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso which consists in the language, descriptions and allegory used by the author in these three different scenarios. I believe Dante will now have a different opportunity to show us how the other parts of the Catholic universe works, how we can change our state of misery due to our sins in Purgatorio and the reward we get for being close to God in Paradiso. As the scene changes, the purpose of the writing changes and as these two pieces change, they transform the language, allegory and descriptions giving a whole new meaning to this incredible, magnificent work.