“And so It goes”
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, he repeats the phrase, “And so it goes” 106 times.
In today’s world of short attention spans and viral posts, the near 300 page book is a slow read, exemplifying, “And so it goes.”
Salman Rushdie wrote in The New Yorker about the novel, “That famous phrase ‘So it goes’ is used only and always as a comment on death.”
In 1945, Vonnegut hid in a slaughterhouse as the Allied Forces bombed of Dresden, killing 25,000 people. Vonnegut wrote, “Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.”
During the novel the main character, Billy, is abducted by aliens and travels to their planet, Tralfamadore, and recounts of the Tralfamadorian, “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore 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 that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They 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.”
Memories, impact, offspring, and matter continue on.
Vonnegut learned from witnessing death in Dresden that life may cease, but existence isn’t erased across space-time.
“And so it goes.”