I’ve written before in The Loop about The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, but another novel in my top ten is the more popular Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Both are near-perfect examples of semi-autobiographical, semi-apocryphal, semi-fantastic historical fiction, both set in and around World War II. Where Slaughterhouse-Five veers enjoyably into comedy and science fiction (and is a great example of non-linear narrative), The Painted Bird is a gripping, disturbing  portrait of the dark side of human nature. The images in both books will stay with you for a long, long time afterward.

And I’m recommending Slaughterhouse-Five today after someone sent me an excerpt from Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture. And there was a section on one of the great “philosophical” lines of Slaughterhouse-Five: And so it goes.

Would be a great name for an autobiography.

Anyway, here’s the section from Quirk Books’ Geek Wisdom on that brilliantly fatalistic line: And so it goes.

Strange as it sounds, the most disturbing and tragic part of Kurt Vonnegut’s meditation on war, inhumanity, and suffering isn’t the violence and horror he shows us, it’s the impassionate distance at which the narrator puts himself from it all. Men are born. They suffer. They slaughter one another before dying themselves, often horribly, often at the hands of another human being. So it goes. If we can embrace such coldness, are we then empty shells or are we merely protecting our psyche from deep emotional damage? Cynical as Vonnegut was, it’s nice to think he wanted us to take away the latter rather than the former. We can neither take part in the horror of man’s violence nor give in to it, but we must acknowledge it. In some way we must come to grips with what we’re capable of doing to one another. We are a beautiful, terrible, sleepless species. And sometimes we’re still animals. So it goes.