Raphael Ranola

One of the stranger perks of being a fossil fuel divestment advocate was ending up on a panel for Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Strange, because I was speaking to a room full of people who were noticeably to the left of me, politically. Yes, Baby Boomer readership of The Daily Illini, there are people who are ideologically more socialist than me.

As graduation quickly approaches, many of my recent musings start with the sentence stem, “In another life.” For example, in another life, I would have studied English. Or classics, or philosophy — something that asked me to sit with ambiguity and think deeply. I can picture that version of myself pretty clearly: someone who’s better-read and has a lot more pretentious essays under his belt. Instead, I studied economics, which entails its own reading, but it’s not the same thing.

Kurt Vonnegut doesn’t really write a war novel in “Slaughterhouse-Five” so much as he writes a novel about war — specifically how war distorts time and the moral trap of trying to make slaughter mean something. He spends the prologue admitting that he couldn’t write the book for years. The horror of living through Dresden wouldn’t turn into a clean story, and no matter how many pages he wrote, he couldn’t get close — for what it’s worth, my drafting process is the same.