(no subject)
"The most important thing I learned on
Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only
appers 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
moments are, and they can look at any moment that
interests them. It's 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 Tralfamadorians say about dead
people, which is 'So it goes.' "