Kurt Vonnegut
Mattatoio n.5 o La crociata dei bambini

To Kurt, who turns one hundred this year.

There are moments when the space and air in our box become so suffocating that there's nothing left to do but imagine what's out there.

This is why I love you, damn visionary, because you made me look beyond those blinders that nature has given me, and I saw everything from another perspective.

Whether this is the true one or not, does it really matter?

…

“I always thought so,” a girl told me, and she spoke of the Tralfamadorian past, present, and future. The weight of time, seen like this, as stretched out on an endless canvas, seemed different to me, almost comforting. Yet, I have not yet experienced jumping from one point to another on the canvas, perhaps because my imagination is not vivid enough; perhaps it happened to her, so young; to Bill, certainly yes.

I won't forget about the films watched backward where, during bombings, planes swallow the bombs, magically extinguishing the fires blazing in the houses.

And I love you for seeing, beyond the flames on the city and the lunar landscape left by the bombing, the birds that say all there is to say about a massacre, that is: “Poo-tee-weet”.

For these and many other small things, you are dear to me, silly you, who torment yourself with thoughts of time and space.

After all, the title was prophetic:

“Slaughterhouse-Five

or

THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE

(a duty-dance with death)”

But I didn't know that.

You took me with you, on an inner and outer journey, to discover, in peace, with new eyes, unexplored corners of life.

Dedicated to those who haven’t discovered them yet, who can do nothing but read the book; and to those who have already done so, who, to find them again, can do nothing but read it again.

P.S.

I would have liked to write to you to tell you how much I liked you in the role of author-narrator, who, after the first chapter where he recounts the long gestation of the work, disappears; but then reappears here and there in the story of Bill.

I would have liked to talk about your protagonist, Bill, anti-hero among anti-heroes, more than anyone a residue of a man. Imagining him, it seems like you hear, here and there,

Levi's question: "Tell me if this is a man?" And I would have liked to tell you that for me the subtle irony of the narration (perhaps) eases human tragedy, but makes the anti-war message even newer and more effective. And still, I should have written to you about the bitter laughs that the barbs you throw at the world of the "winners" and its blaming of the poor and the different gave me...

...but yesterday words failed me.

I greet you and thank you once again,

See you soon.

Dado