I’ve used the term Tralfamadorian to refer to people that blind themselves to the hard parts of life. It’s from Slaughterhouse-5, and for people of our generation I suppose talking about it is like saying “have you heard of this Gatsby book?”
But for the Vonnegut virgins: a Tralfamadorian is an alien that looks like a plunger with a hand at the top of its handle, and in the hand it holds a large eyeball. They, and apparently every creature in the universe except humans, live time achronologically, traveling easily through their lives at will. They focus all their attention on the good parts of life, and whenever they see something unpleasant, they close their hands over their eyes to keep from seeing it, and travel freely to happier times.
Alan Moore’s forthcoming novel (edging towards 3/4 of a million words long) contains “an explanation of the afterlife that conforms to all known laws of physics.” So let’s talk just a little bit about living forever, living backwards, and life doubling back on itself.
Mr. Moore’s take:
Is death a fearful thing to you?
Not at all. Hopefully, if I do this book well enough, it will perhaps take some of the anxiety off of other people’s shoulders…. I started to formulate the theory, the idea [of] transience: that time is passing, that life is going away somewhere, that this is an illusion, albeit a persistent one. And I think I can explain that pretty well somewhere in the course of this 2,000-page leviathan.Is there is an afterlife?
Well, we may not need one. That, just conceivably, we might get this life forever — you’ll have to read the book to get the whole thing, but I tend to think that it’s a pretty watertight theory: That you don’t get reincarnated as somebody else, but that you get reincarnated as yourself, over and over again. You have the same thoughts, and you never know you’ve done this [before], except for those little moments of déjà vu. (link, it’s on page 4)
From The Man Who Grew Young by Daniel Quinn, where the universe has expanded as far as it can go and is now compressing, and the main character is living life backwards until The Big Crunch (honestly, Science, can’t you do better than The Big Crunch? The Big Crush would be slightly more palateble):
It was a good time to be alive. The days of catastrophe were only a memory. In a matter of forty years, the human population had dropped from eleven billion to less than six. The water in the pipes, in the lakes and rivers, was barely poisonous now. Blindness and skin cancer weren’t as commonplace as they had once been. For reasons not entirely clear, what had once been a rather tenuous layer of ozone was now growing, thick, and many scientists viewed this as a good sign for the future, though I wasn’t exactly sure why.
At the newspaper, we’d recently gotten rid of our computer system, to everyone’s relief. I think we all felt more valuable relying on our own brains and muscles.
Every year, the planet was growing greener. Scientists said this explained why the air was getting cleaner. Or partly explained it. Of course, factories were running day and night, and that helped. Every year, billions of tons of fossil fuel were going into the ground.
And from Slaughterhouse-5, where the protagonist, having come “unstuck in time,” watches a war movie backwards. The passage that made me love Vonnegut:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. 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 containers were stored neatly in racks. 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. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where the 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.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie, Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
Where I am in my life, right now, I think it’d be alright if dying meant reliving this someday.
