This elimination round sees me roll back the years and take a closer look at two books I first read in high school.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (May 2018)
The most memorable aspect of rereading this 1969 classic was discovering Vonnegut’s powerful anti-war message. You may scoff at this, reader – how did you miss that the first time??? – but in my defense, I present a number of counter arguments, including (i) I was in high school, (ii) most people are idiots in high school, (iii) I was like most people in high school, (iv) it’s possible I didn’t read the book very carefully, and (v) it’s possible I just forgot this given that high school was almost literally half a lifetime ago!
Point (v) brings me neatly to the other aspect of this book I believe I am only just now learning to appreciate – the way the main protagonist experiences time without linearity. I mention it here because although I understand how long ago high school was, there are moments when I feel like it all happened just yesterday. This is not to suggest I believe I am time traveling – I am under no illusion that the next moment will send me hurtling backward or forward in time. What I refer to is my growing understanding about the strength of certain memories and a new appreciation for how this power can make certain reminisces feel as if I’m thinking back twenty minutes rather than twenty years.
Parting thought: Standard bombing during WWII caused more death than nuclear weapons.
It’s easy to study history in the 21st century and wag a finger at decisions made many decades ago. How could our leaders have concluded that their best option was to use nuclear weapons? Nuance comes with context and in this example knowing that the relative loss of life was comparable to that of infamous missions like the Dresden fire bombing helps me understand that the alternatives considered in the Allied war room likely bore little resemblance to the way someone in 2019 might frame the question.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (December 2018)
Like with Slaughterhouse-Five, I found a greater appreciation for this work after returning to it as an adult than I did when I (sort of) read it in high school. Marquez’s characters share a certain perspective with the above mentioned book – although the clock consistently moves forward in Macondo, the characters often experience time in a circular rather than linear way. This theme is reinforced throughout by the characters’ recycled names, the events that shape the destiny of the town, and – my personal favorite example – Melquiades and his damn parchments.
Parting thought: Though circular in nature, life moves forward not as the wheel turns but when the axle wears out.
The strange paradox of life is that we thrive with the new and the novel yet we constantly push ourselves toward greater stability. Nowhere do I witness this challenge in action more than in the battle between maintenance and invention, an ongoing war of escalating complexity in structure, process, and procedure that struggles in vain against our natural instinct to renew through a cycle of destruction and creation. Humans who succumb to the pressure of keeping things the same are doomed to churn forever like wheels in the mud, sinking into a rut of their own making, forever spinning in their structure until the axle breaks and forces them out.
