Due gioielli da Slaughter-house-five. Sul linguaggio, sul tempo, sulla vita e sulla morte.

“There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right; each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message-describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. 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 suspence, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

“The most important thing I learned from Tralfarmadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is 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. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the mountains 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.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in 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 Tralfamadorian say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’”

And so on.