October 19: Bombings and Sky Battles, Synchronicity, Barack Obama

Just about the time poor Valencia was pronounced dead, Lily came into Billy's and Rumfoord's room with an armload of books.  Rumfoord had sent her down to Boston to get them.  He was working on a one-volume history of the United States Army Air Corps in World War Two.  The books were about bombings and sky battles that had happened before Lily was even born.

Really, this passage is all about dovetailing.  All of the details of Billy's life sort of funnel together in this moment.  Billy in the hospital bed.  His wife just dead.  His roommate a history professor writing a book about the bombings of World War II, Dresden, I'm sure, among them.  There's a certain synchronicity in what is happening.

In writing, I love this kind of happenstance, when the elements of a novel or essay or poem all coalesce and things become a little clearer.  Now, this passage doesn't necessarily tie up the loose ends of Slaughterhouse, but it certainly feels like the beginning of the end.

This kind of dovetailing rarely happens in real life.  There's too much chaos.  Too much entropy.  Things tend to fall apart in the world, not come together.  I know that sounds pessimistic, but recent events in the United States bear this observation out.  At the end of the Presidency of Barack Obama, the country seemed to be in a good place.  We were on the road to a kind of universal health care.  Job growth for eight years.  Climate change was a priority.  Tolerance and love were the norm.  And almost the entire world respected us.

Now . . . well, Donald Trump.

I'm not going to devolve into an anti-Trump rant.  What I'm saying is that things don't feel like they're coming together any more.  I'm not living in the epilogue to the Obama Presidency.  I'm living in the prologue to Mein Kampf.

Saint Marty is thankful for the synchronicity of Barack Obama.