Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni" (Vonnegut 11).
As I was reading Chapter 1 of The Slaughterhouse-Five, I stumbled across the phrase "eheu, fugaces labuntur anni." At first, I dismissed it as one of Vonnegut's many eccentric phrases in the novel. I googled the phrase after reading about how he took his daughter and her friend Allison, who were both outfitted in the best of their white party dresses, to the last World's Fair and to see his war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare. The phrase means, in Latin: "Alas! How the fleeting years glide away." The sentence was taken from Horace's Odes, or his collection of four books of lyric poems, which date from 23-13 BC. He modeled them after the shorter Greek lyric poems of Pindar, Sappho, and Alcaeus.
With this allusion, Vonnegut was reflecting on how his youth and his years with his daughter have passed. Also, he looks back at the time of World Fairs, which now depict a simpler, more innocent past. He tells the audience with this allusion that he too is feeling the effects of aging on his memories. The last time he visited O'Hare, his daughter was only a girl in a pristine party dress, and looking back as he writes his Dresden book, he realizes his "fleeting years have glided away".
Thank you for this! I am reading this book as a junior in high school in a CP class and the teacher assigned four chapters with a study guide for one night.
ReplyDeleteThis makes so much more sense. My class is doing a socratic seminar and no one could answer the question as to what the line represents or signifies.
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