“Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.”

Can you imagine what life would be like if we experienced it backwards? Not just Benjamin Button kind of backwards, but having it actually start at your death and make its way towards the past? Would we act in a different way? Wouldn’t this change the future (which in this case is the past)? All of these thoughts rushed into my mind as I read one of the best descriptions in the entire book. In it, Vonnegut recounts a World War II movie Billy watches while waiting for aliens to abduct him. I love the way Vonnegut was able to recreate a horrible scene, and turn it into what I consider to be a masterpiece. He started with the complete and utter destruction caused in World War II and ended in a complete utopia.

“Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.” (pg. 74). As I reflected upon what life would be like if everything occurred as it did in this peculiar movie, i suddenly remembered an old documentary I saw a couple of years ago about subliminal messages found in songs when they were played backwards. This is a technique known as backmasking, in which sound is recorded backwards when it was originally supposed to be played forwards. The documentary talked about a teenage boy that started listening to music all the time. He soon started to shun people out of his life and lock himself in his room for hours, simply listening to the songs over and over again. His parents never paid much attention to this, for they thought he was just going through a phase. They never expected to come home a few months later and find the lifeless form of their son hanging from the ceiling of his bedroom, with music still blasting on the stereo. They took the CD’s to a specialist who,with the help of backmasking, was able to uncover subliminal messages found in the music, and concluded that it was these messages which led the boy to commit suicide.

Although I still can’t decide whether or not I believe in this theory, it is still amazing how there can be so much more to things than meets the eye. But then again, life is about perspective, it’s about choosing how you truly want to view the world. Do you want to start at the beginning? Or at the end? How about starting in the middle? You should just try to find what view suits you best, which one feels right for you, because the truth is that in the end it won’t really matter, the result will be the same. Who knows where we end up after death, we are all forced to leave anyways.