I am a Pillar of Salt

"I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

So it goes.

There were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them.

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore." (21-22)

When I first read this passage, there was just something about it that stuck me. As we went through the first few chapters of the novel, I kept going back to it, trying to figure out what it was about the few simple paragraphs that was so drawing. I knew the story of Lot and his wife and of Sodom and Gomorrah before I read Slaughterhouse Five, but I never really thought of it in the way Vonnegut expresses it.

The story of Lot's wife is the story of each and every one of us, although (to my knowledge) we are not literally going to be turned to pillars of salt. We, as humans, have this tendency to always look back. We line up our memories in our minds and play them over and over until it's as if they were happening again. For some of us, it is a way to remember loved ones we've lost or unique memories, for others, it is a torture device.

So often, it seems, I get caught up thinking about what happened in the past, all the things I've left behind, and all the things I did and could have done. I make myself dizzy chasing the question through my mind: would things be better if I had done that some other way? So much of my time is spent regretting the things I've messed up, and analyzing moments and words that other people have probably forgotten. Sometimes I am so preoccupied thinking about what has already happened that I can't see what is happening right before my eyes. I can't see today or tomorrow or the next day. All I see is yesterday.

I lose a lot when I think like that, when I'm stuck in reverse. I think that's kind of what Vonnegut is saying, that we are all, in essence, turning ourselves into pillars of salt by spending so much of our time walking backwards. We think and analyze and chip away at our pasts until they turn around and chip away at us. We break things into so many pieces and, in turn, we are broken down. We are pillars of salt.

"People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore." (22)

Nice try.