Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s acclaimed 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (or the Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death). Billy is lackluster, unremarkable, confused, directionless, and ultimately strangely relatable. As a young man he gets sent out to World War II, and after only a few days he is captured by German soldiers and shipped off to Dresden as a prisoner of war. He endures. He suffers. He zones out. He lives through a massacre, the firebombing of Dresden. And then he goes home to the U.S.A., to live out all this traumatic violence for the rest of his life.

But ‘the rest’ of his life is a bit odd, since Billy Pilgrim has somehow ‘come unstuck in time.’ There isn’t a normal ‘rest of his life’ to live out, because he doesn’t live chronologically, in straight order. Instead,

“Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”

Throughout this collage of life experiences, Billy sometimes ends up on display in an alien zoo, on the planet Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians are always unstuck in time – that’s how they normally live. All Tralfamadorians experience their lives as a collage of events, all together, all at once. So they are able to explain things to Billy. More or less. They tell Billy: “All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”

Billy has a tough time understanding their perspective, and they don’t fully comprehend Billy either. For example, Billy can’t quite grasp what it means when they assert there is no ‘choice’ or ‘free will’ in the Universe. As Billy’s Tralfamadorian zookeeper says to him: “If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings, I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”

At first, this Tralfamadorian worldview feels distasteful to Billy. It can give off that flavour to the reader as well, who might begin to worry that Vonnegut is suggesting there’s no reason to care, to act, to strive, to love, to do anything. Might as well just numb ourselves with entertaining pleasantries. But Vonnegut is never staking this point as an argument about how things are, or how they should be. He’s setting us up with a question – a question that only becomes possible with a radically repositioned perspective.

What does it mean to take a perspective on life that is unstuck from time?

Here’s a strange turn, a new weird way of elaborating on this question: It’s the same kind of question that philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also posed, once upon a time, when he presented the concept of an ‘eternal return.’ In The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote:

The heaviest weight. – What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

This idea of the eternal return has provoked many pages of argument over the years. Importantly, the aphorism itself is clearly posed as a question. How do you deal with a reality where everything keeps happening to you over and over again? How do you react to it? The idea, and the question, has roots in stoic ethics. Epictetus said it like this: “it’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” It’s a question about your reaction, so you have to come up with your own answers

Nietzsche’s ‘little demon’ is Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorian! Nietzsche and Vonnegut are worlds apart on a lot of the details that frame these two texts, but there’s a very specific and unavoidable connection here. I’m actually a bit amazed I never noticed it before. This bridge only showed up for me by accident when I started trying to think more carefully about Slaughterhouse-Five. They present us with basically the same dislocation of time, the same question, the same challenge. If moments in time are infinitely repeating, never-ending, what makes that burden bearable? If you believe the little demon or the Tralfamadorians, then how well disposed would you have to become to yourself to truly accept Billy Pilgrim’s chosen epitaph? – “Everything was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt.”

It appears, at first, that there is an obvious answer. If everything is going to happen again and again then you better do it ‘right,’ so you don’t have to bear the shame and torture of going through eternal failures. We can call this answer the ‘superman answer.’ It takes the eternal return as a challenge to buck up and be super about everything.

It is a silly answer. Yet it’s popular. For instance, a quick google search took me straight to a college-exam-cram-time synopsis of the eternal return, which emphasized this quote from John Kaag: “Nietzsche suggests that the affirmation of the eternal return is possible only if one is willing and able to become well-adjusted to life and to oneself… The specter of infinite monotony was for Nietzsche the abiding impetus to assume absolute responsibility: if one’s choices are to be replayed endlessly, they’d better be the ‘right’ ones.” (https://philosophybreak.com/articles/eternal-recurrence-what-did-nietzsche-really-mean/)

The stress of that sounds crushing. The ‘right’ choices!? Every time!? Yikes.

It’s all-too-easy (all-too-human) to draw a straight line from the eternal return to Nietzsche’s own concept of the Ubermensch (‘superman’), and call it a day. The dumbed-down popular version of this ‘superman’ is just someone who can make all the ‘right choices,’ who can overcome at life – as if you can ‘win’ the demon’s little game by doing everything ‘right.’ The trophy is… no worries, for the rest of your days.

Relevantly, this answer has also long appealed to the Fascists and assholes and chauvinists of the world. There is a flair of chauvinism that is more or less obvious in a lot of Nietzsche’s own political and cultural opinions, and it lurks here too. It’s the kind of perspective that serves the American dream ideology, for example, which tells us that all distinctions in society, and all fortune for an individual, can be judged simply on the basis of how that individual has ‘reacted to life.’ ‘It’s all up to you and anyone can succeed if they try hard enough!’ That means that success and failure are fully on an individuals’ own shoulders, that being strong and successful is only a matter of will-power, and that, therefore, the ‘haves’ deserve their bounty and the ‘have nots’ deserve their poverty. It’s this kind of valuing of ‘power’ and ‘force’ that supports the current resurgence in Far Right ideals, in the United States chillingly clear, but elsewhere too.

This kind of attitude sees life as primarily a competition. Survival of the fittest. Billy Pilgrim is not this guy. Not super. Not the fittest. It’s not clear that he’s choosing much of anything at all, let alone making the ‘right choices.’

So, representing the opposite pole to the ‘superman answer,’ Billy Pilgrim seems at first to represent a resigned ‘fatalist answer’ to the eternal return question. In this answer, the eternal return is just a way of envisioning how deeply depressing, un-controllable, and meaningless life really is. You can’t do anything about it. Everything is just going to happen. Nothing matters and there’s no point in trying.

But this isn’t the way Kurt Vonnegut presents the question either. He is trying to articulate a much more humble and humanistic question of what it means to deal with the traumatic insanity of modern human existence. The photograph on the cover of my album shows a statue of ‘kindness’ looking down over the desolation of Dresden. Kindness has survived. Kindness is still there, in the rubble. How does kindness survive that evil, and continue smiling? This is much closer to the question Vonnegut is asking.

Vonnegut is uniquely playful with these kinds of questions in his work. Salman Rushdie has noted, for example, how this shows up in the character of Kilgore Trout – an alter-ego novelist who appears in several of Vonnegut’s stories, including Slaughterhouse Five. Rushdie observes that

“we are asked to see [Trout] simultaneously as a genius and a fool. This is not accidental. His creator, Kurt Vonnegut, was at once the most intellectual of playful fantasists and the most playfully fantastic of intellectuals. He had a horror of people who took things too seriously and was simultaneously obsessed with the consideration of the most serious things, things both philosophical (like free will) and lethal (like the firebombing of Dresden).”

(https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-kurt-vonneguts-slaughterhouse-five-tells-us-now)

Vonnegut does not answer the question of the eternal return in either of the simplistic extremes: not the overcoming stressed-out superman, and not the resigned back-broken fatalist. And in my opinion, neither does Nietzsche. They both have something more playfully fantastic brewing. Perhaps we can call this third reaction something like… the ‘smiling answer.’

It does seem to me that Kurt would enthusiastically agree with Friedrich on this point, at least:

Taking seriously. – For most people, the intellect is an awkward, gloomy, creaking machine that is hard to start; when they want to work with this machine and think well, they call it ‘taking the matter seriously’ – oh, how taxing good thinking must be for them! The lovely human beast seems to lose its good mood when it thinks well; it becomes ‘serious!’ And ‘where laughter and gaiety are found thinking is good for nothing’ – that is a prejudice of this serious beast against all ‘gay science.’ Well, then, let us prove it a prejudice!”

Vonnegut proves it a prejudice. His whole career is a case-in-point that it’s possible, and profound, to engage serious matters with playful fantasy. It’s this vantage that makes Slaughterhouse-Five so great. It is both deeply sad and extremely funny. The sad bits are hilarious and the funny bits are depressing. It’s a special thing. And it’s another answer to the question: “how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

How to hold the serious lightly, and instil significance in the playful?

How does kindness smile in the wreckage?

It was alright, somehow, his being dead. So it goes.

Throughout Slaughterhouse Five, the ‘so it goes’ line is a repeating narrative device which appears after any mention of death. It’s like a way of marking death, matter of factly – saying, ‘this too has occurred, as everything must.’

“On the ninth day, the hobo died. So it goes.”

“Martin Luther King Jr. was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.”

“There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by. They didn’t smell that bad at first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and liquified, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas.
So it goes.”

“Billy uncorked [the champagne] with his thumbs. It didn’t make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes.”

Trying to explain things to his fellow Earthlings, Billy Pilgrim lays it out for us: “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but 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.’ ”

It feels, at first, as you read it coming up again and again, that it’s callous and numb, a resignation of sorts. It is. It turns each death into just another moment. But this resignation also opens up the chance for a revaluation of values. As the story proceeds, the ‘So it goes’ bit wears you down. And when it wears you down far enough, that’s when it becomes possible to begin taking up the Tralfamadorian perspective where death holds no special privilege in the hierarchy of a life’s events. As Billy says, Tralfamadorians “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.” This perspective which sees all moments as ‘permanent’ evens them all out. It levels the playing field, razing the hierarchy of values that we have all set up for ourselves – about which parts of life are more or less important than which other parts. Maybe this demolition is what the little demon is so delighted about?

Tralfamadorians write their fiction from this perspective too. In a Tralfamadorian novel “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.” A Tralfamadorian novel is like having life flash before your eyes. All the salient moments get smashed together and weighed against each other, to create a big constellation of assembled meaning as a whole. The individual pieces of life no longer matter by themselves. In the face of death, everything only matters together, in reference to the entire life. It’s not a linear chronological narrative, it’s a multi-dimensional pattern. It’s not a story, it’s an assembly. Ugly and lovely, miraculous and disastrous, enthralling and haunting. It’s a group of events to marvel at.

Tralfamadorians see the eternal return as marvellous and complex – enough that it’s worth making art about it. But it’s also simple and natural – enough that it requires no special day-to-day ‘reaction’ to deal with it, to live with it. There is no “gnashing of teeth” involved. The normalness of it all turns the question upside down, in a way: what does it mean if the eternal return is not a question of reactions at all? Maybe the only relevant reaction is to learn that reactions are irrelevant? Maybe the only response that would really piss off the little demon would be: “Meh.”

“It was alright,” said Billy. “Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore.”

What if truly accepting the eternal return kills the question in it? So it goes.

There was a lot that Billy said that was gibberish to the Tralfamadorians, too. They couldn’t imagine what time looked like to him. Billy had given up on explaining that. The guide outside had to explain as best he could.
The guide invited the crowd to imagine they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.
This was only the beginning of Billy’s miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe. He didn’t know he was on a flatcar, didn’t even know there was anything peculiar about his situation.
The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped – went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe he had no choice but to say to himself, “That’s life.”

Vonnegut’s novel and Nietzsche’s aphorism are questions. They are not meant to provoke a specific ‘right’ answer. It’s a question about how to live, a way of eliciting personal reflection on one’s own life as a whole. By imagining a perspective that is outside of ourselves, beyond the normal experience of being inside time, it demands that each of us addresses our own orientation to living.

The Tralfamadorian experience and/or the situation of the eternal return is to see your whole life as a full pattern. That’s not something that us humans can (normally) do. We’re bolted to a one-dimensional point in time – the present moment. “All we can see is the little dot at the end of the pipe.” But the Tralfamadorians and the little demon explode this perspective – they take us off the flatcar rails, remove the steel helmet, and open up the vista. This expanded perspective could make it possible to re-evaluate life as a full pattern, as a complete constellation, as a three-dimensional Tralfamadorian panorama of time.

In popular Western culture today, meditation and wellness advice often extol us to ‘be present’ and ‘be fully in the moment.’ The Western ‘yoga industrial complex’ draws a lot from ancient systems, which have their own complex and socially-contextualized ways of framing things. Yet, as is also common with Western appropriations of Asian practices, complexity and detail is all-too-often jettisoned for the sake of convenience and speed. For instance, our popular culture tends to see meditation as requiring extreme measures of self-discipline. Again, cue the superman. We have to exert willpower to block out the past and the future, to cut them away from the present, so they don’t muck up the perfect stillness of the moment. Like ‘being in the moment’ requires fortress walls to keep thoughts of the past and the future from intruding and ransacking the pure present.

Sounds kind of like the idea is to put on a steel helmet, and look down a long pipe, while bolted to a flatcar on rails… Ahhhhh, peace at last.

But meditation is actually more like a practice that helps you take off the steel helmet, not put it on. What if there is no single isolated moment? The Tralfamadorians have abducted you, to tell you there isn’t. The little demon has snuck into your room, to tell you there isn’t. They are here to pronounce that the present is never really cut off from all the other times of your life. Earthlings are just usually looking down the pipe, and are not able to recognize the panorama of time all around them. But if there is no quantum of time, no single moment, then being present does not mean being here instead of being caught in the past or hooked by the future – it means being here with the burdens of the past and the anxieties of the future.

Billy learns to engage his life this way, kind of – to the extent that he can. He sort of gets it, sometimes. Mostly he’s just bracing for the impact of whatever moment he trips into next. Mostly he’s trying to balance the experience of having his trauma constantly jumping out at him from behind the next door.

He does seem to do a marvelous job at this, I’ll give him that. He adapts to his time travel, and learns to slide quite smoothly between very incongruous moments, feelings, reactions, and challenges. He must start to feel like they all blend together, as if every single moment of his life might call for the same general attitude. It would be easier than constantly rebooting for a new emotional orientation, every time you travel to some random new scene. Smooth, generalized, blanket adaptability. This might be part of why Billy Pilgrim is a bit of a blob, why he acts and reacts so blandly, why he has so little defined individual personality, and excels only at camouflaging himself into each situation. I It’s a numbness, an adaptation, way of levelling out experience, so that the trauma at the heart of it all is kept under control.

Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five it’s notable that the big traumatic event – the Dresden fire bombing, plausibly the largest single massacre in human history – does not actually get any active stage time. It’s circled, skirted, and only looked at sideways. Billy is happy to go here, there, and everywhere. Just as long as he doesn’t have to go back there.

There is black hole at the centre of Billy’s life. It has the most immense gravity. It’s so heavy he can’t look at it, it can’t be seen. This black hole is trauma: a singular intense event, around which everything circles, through which everything is filtered, but which cannot be named, seen, exposed, and faced by itself.

Slaughterhouse-Five is about war, and aliens, and time travel, certainly – but through all that it’s about trauma.

Gabor Maté has a helpfully sensitive approach to what trauma means, explaining that:

“Trauma is a wound. And how I think about it is, if I wounded you, if I cut your flesh, then the healing would involve scar tissue forming. If the wound was great enough there would be a big scar there, and the scar would be without nerve endings so you wouldn’t feel, and it would be much less flexible than your normal flesh and connective tissue. So trauma is when there is a loss of feeling and there is a reduced flexibility in responding to the world, there is a hardening that happens. So trauma is a psychic wound that hardens you psychologically, that then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It pains you, and now you’re acting out of pain. It induces fear, so now you’re acting out of fear. And without knowing it, your whole life is regulated by fear and pain like you’re trying to escape from it by various ways. Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.”

Trauma is how painful experiences stay inside you. This is how pain holds on to us. Even when the harm is gone, the pain stays. When trauma arises, it’s pain from the past and/or anxiety of the future intruding to devour the present. It is, in a sense, emotional time-travelling. An emotion that is stuck, a scar from some other moment, comes up uninvited into the present, regardless of what emotion the current moment actually calls for. Trauma is an inability to protect the present from the future and the past.

The question of the eternal return threatens the present moment in a similar way. If the idea of the eternal return feels like it would be endless hell, it’s because it feels like submitting to trauma – to painful experiences that will come back again and again and never go away. It’s being condemned to never forgetting anything. It’s an expansion of perspective so that there is no present moment which can exist apart from the past and the future. An entire life is no longer allowed to be broken up into bits and pieces. There’s only the whole life, all together.

What a pickle. It can mean that being pulled back into pain again and again, forever, is the hell of trauma. There is anxiety and trauma lurking, if you let the panoramic view of a whole life open up. Yet, at the same time, returning to a painful event on purpose – intentionally going to it, rather than anxiously waiting for it to come to you, and living it out again with a different perspective – can be a way to get through trauma, to dismantle its emotional hold and to heal from it. Having that panoramic perspective on life could also be a path towards smiling, in the face of it all.

Can the Tralfamadorian perspective and the eternal return be a revaluation of perspective that help to flush trauma away? Vonnegut tells us that Tralfamadorians look like a big green hand with one eye in the centre, on top of a body shaped like a toilet plunger. John Green has wondered that maybe Tralfamadorians look like toilet plungers because they represent a process of ‘unblocking’ Billy’s trauma, to loosen all the clogged-up shit he can’t flush away.

Green has also noted that Billy’s experience as the ‘human exhibit’ in a Tralfamadorian zoo is actually lot like the prisoner of war camp he inhabited, and yet it is also the most peaceful, simple, and pleasant part of his entire life. The idea here is that Billy’s zoo experience is a coping mechanism – a pleasantly dissociated version of the POW camp that he uses to block out his painful reality with a fantasized surrogate. And the same goes for all the rest of Billy’s life, in a way. The Tralfamadorian perspective becomes the lens through which Billy learns to relate with his trauma; it offers him the capacity to re-evaluate and carry on with his entire life. It allows him to live with his fate – not to fight it, and not to resign to it. He may even begin to enjoy parts of it in a special way once he’s gotten into the flow of his eternal returns.

Trauma cannot be ‘overcome’ or ‘defeated.’ Fighting it just means fighting with yourself. It also won’t go away by giving up, submitting to it, waiting patiently for it to fade away. Trauma has to be engaged – you have to face it, go back into it anew, reposition it in a new relationship with the other parts of your life, revalue it according to a constellation of other emotions, refresh it. Trauma is not an external ‘it’ – trauma is a part of your own insides, a way of reacting. We’re not taking about ‘dealing with a thing,’ we’re talking about establishing a relationship with ourselves. Your trauma is you. You have to change yourself in relation to yourself, and become someone new in relationship with your own reactions. You have to work through yourself, live with yourself.

Drawing from Nietzsche’s language, unclogging trauma means becoming ‘well disposed to yourself.’ Resolutely going back to the stuff that you might want to bury and forget, and working it into the panoramic Tralfamadorian constellation that makes up ‘you.’ If you’re looking down the barrel of the six-foot pipe, stuck in the cut-off view of a single moment, then trauma can easily ambush you – pop up and take over the entire viewhole. But if your present isn’t limited to the little dot at the end of the pipe, then trauma can’t stage the same kind of sneak-attack. It can’t take up ‘everything’ when it appears. You can “look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of you, or even down into a canyon behind you.” It’s all you.

The Tralfamadorians and the little demon are telling us that trauma doesn’t ‘go away.’ The whole point here is that nothing ever goes away. It’s all still all there. The trauma is like the dead person, who is in “bad condition in that particular moment, but the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.” So it goes. If it gets dealt with effectively that’s because its place of importance in a life gets flattened out, as all moments become more equally valued, and the traumatic events are contextualized into the overall scene, balanced out by all the other parts of the panorama.

“Well here we are Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

“Isn’t this a nice moment?”
“Yes.”
“That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”
“Um,” said Billy Pilgrim.

Despite their grand perspective on time, Tralfamadorians are not ‘better’ than humans. As they tell Billy, they also make terrible wars and stupid mistakes. In fact, for them, ‘being better’ is a silly and irrelevant concept – they can’t teach humans about being better because it’s a thoroughly meaningless idea to them. There is no linear narrative arc to their lives, so things don’t get better or worse in any order. There’s just good parts and bad parts, with all their values levelled out by a panoramic view of time.

There isn’t actually much narrative arc in Billy’s life, either. He doesn’t ‘learn’ much, or ‘overcome’ essential challenges, or ‘get better’ at anything. He’s confused and scared of everything. Or he’s confused and pleasantly accepting of everything. Or he’s confused and numbly unclear on how to react to everything. It’s a fairly jumbled pattern.

It’s certainly not a traditional ‘story-line,’ and this is another important hallmark of Vonnegut’s style. It’s a jumbled chaotic pattern, yes. So it is able to express real life much more profoundly than most novels usually do. Life is not a story. On this point Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has made his position explicit, like in this passage from his 1973 novel, Breakfast of Champions:

“As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And so on. Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.”

“All facts would be given equal weightiness.” The heaviest weight. Or… the lightest weight?

Same difference.

Billy does absorb something of this belief system, from the Tralfamadorian perspective. And while he can’t fully fathom it, he begins to believe in it and engage with it. And it is notable that his own personal contentment rises in relation to how ‘crazily’ he accepts his condition. He seems most lively when he is fervently espousing the Tralfamadorian philosophy of life. It can be done.

There’s actually a surprising amount of Billy Pilgrim-esque qualities that show up in another famous passage from The Gay Science, where Nietzsche declares:

“I want to learn more and more how to be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation. And, all in all and on the whole: some day I want to only be a Yes-sayer!”

Billy Pilgrim never accuses. Billy Pilgrim wages no wars. As far as I can think, he basically does no harm to anyone, ever. ‘Looking away’ may indeed be his only negation. All in all and on the whole, Billy Pilgrim says yes with equal weightiness to all the events of his life – to the absurd, the terrifying, the boring, the exhilarating, you name it.

He gets there thoroughly by accident, but Billy Pilgrim might be an unexpected model of what it means to be a ‘yes-sayer to fate.’ He responds to the big question of the eternal return without resorting to the indignities of superman posturing or fatalist grovelling. It’s a surprising thought, to be honest, that Billy Pilgrim might be the most humble and humane model anyone has yet to come up with: not of how the question should ideally be answered, but of how the question does really get answered.

He adapts himself to a life lived with his events; not in-spite of them, not submitting to them. Finding a way to love fate is not about ‘attaining anything.’ Not getting better at it. Just being with it.

The with is really important. I keep italicizing it with abandon.

Amor fati. That love requires a with. Amor fati is not ‘loving fate.’ It’s being in love with fate.

You can’t ‘love at’ something. Love is not a conquest. Love is not a resignation. Love is a relationship that happens in direct presence, but also involves extended care throughout time. It’s like when people say they love ‘all’ of a person – the good and the bad. Amor fati is loving ‘all’ of a life, the good and the bad.

To live with each moment. Some of the time, at least. But some of the time is still all of the time, after all.

“Everything was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt.”

Again, same as with the panorama of time, these words can split off into two very opposite meanings. Traumatic hell or enlightened release? On the one hand, that saying feels like a delusional escape from reality – the kind of life-philosophy that erases pain by circling trauma, and avoiding deep engagement with the present moment. On the other hand, it might be an enlightened escape from illusion – the kind of life-philosophy that eases pain by going deep into every event, and really living with the present moment.

The heaviest weight? The lightest weight?

Which one has Billy Pilgrim chosen?

Same difference?

There’s some marvellous patterns in Billy Pilgrim.

It’s a life!

That’s life.

Amor fati, Tralfamadorian-style.

“ ‘Um,’ said Billy Pilgrim. ”