Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse Five was author's way of exorcising his personal demons after living through the firebombing of Dresden as an American POW in a Germany. In the novel, the protagonist was a prisoner of war who becomes unstuck in time, and the narrative shifts between World War II, the present, and life on a distant planet where he is has a baby with a film star named Montana Wildhack.
At the end of the First World War, a British soldier wrote a poem "to the man I used to be" at the beginning of the war. I think the combination of a Pandemic, Trump, and the racial upheavals in the country are creating a watershed moment in our history. Increasingly people will look at 2016 and wonder about the person they used to be.
The Chinese curse of interesting times and all that. Are there elements today reminiscent of Berlin in the 20's? In some ways it feels like the tumult of the 60's but in a more compressed time frame and with greater urgency. Right Covid-19 is killing more Americans every week than the the Axis powers during World War II.
And we have not yet come to the rest of the year and the election. So look on the bright side, as Harry Lime did in
The Third Man:
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michaelangelo, da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
So yeah, probably some good literature ahead.
Yay!