"Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

'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.
'When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a 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."'
And so on.

Billy was working on this letter in the basement rumpus room of his empty house. It was his
housekeeper's day off. There was an old typewriter in the rumpus room. It was a beast. It weighed
as much as a storage battery. Billy couldn't carry it very far very easily, which was why he was
writing in the rumpus room instead of somewhere else.
The oil burner had quit. A mouse had eaten through the insulation of a wire leading to the
thermostat. The temperature in the house was down to fifty degrees, but Billy hadn't noticed. He
wasn't warmly dressed, either. He was barefoot, and still in his pajamas and a bathrobe, though it
was late afternoon. His bare feet were blue and ivory.
The cockles of Billy's heart, at any rate, were glowing coals. What made them so hot was Billy's
belief that he was going to comfort so many people with the truth about time. His door chimes
upstairs had been ringing and ringing. It was his daughter Barbara up there wanting in. Now she
let herself in with a key, crossed the floor over his head calling, 'Father? Daddy, where are
you?' And so on.
Billy didn't answer her, so she was nearly hysterical, expecting to find his corpse. And then
she looked into the very last place there was to look-which was the rumpus room.

'Why didn't you answer me when I called?' Barbara wanted to know, standing there in the door
of the rumpus room. She had the afternoon paper with her, the one in which Billy described his
friends from Tralfamadore.
'I didn't hear you,' said Billy.
The orchestration of the moment was this: Barbara was only twenty-one years old, but she
thought her father was senile, even though he was only forty-six-senile because of damage to his
brain in the airplane crash. She also thought that she was head of the family, since she had had
to manage her mother's funeral, since she had to get a housekeeper for Billy, and all that. Also,
Barbara and her husband were having to look after Billy's business interests, which were
considerable, since Billy didn't seem to give a damn for business any more. All this
responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet. And Billy, meanwhile, was
trying to hang onto his dignity, to persuade Barbara and everybody else that he was far from
senile, that, on the contrary, he was devoting himself to a calling much higher than mere
business.
He was doing nothing less now, he thought, then prescribing corrective lenses for Earthling
souls. So many of those souls were lost and wretched, Billy believed, because they could not see
as well as Ws little green friends on Tralfamadore.

'Don't lie to me, Father,' said Barbara. 'I know perfectly well you heard me when I called.'
This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano. Now she