Looking For Alaska

John Green, you always make me question my entire life. In a good way.

Today I finished reading Looking for Alaska. It only dawns on me now, writing this, how profound the title is. "Looking" is what we're all doing isn't it? Looking for the ones we think we know, looking for the ones we love the most.

Anyway, as far as the book goes, there were quite a few parts that really pulled at my mind.

"Believe what? I thought, and right then, the rain came."

I loved this sentence. It was like poetry, like Miles was saying believe in the rain and in freedom, in the cleanliness of the earth (as a side note, isn't it funny how characters in books sometimes lose their names? I don't think of the main character, the narrator, as "Miles" or even "Pudge." He's just there in my head as an already complete character, a portrait of a person from a story in my mind.) Believe in beauty, believe in the rain.

"I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to."

There is some truth to this, I think. Some part of the human heart will deny with utmost vehemence the idea that what it once loved has been consigned to oblivion. Some part of the human heart wishes to ease the grief of loss by believing they still live on. How can a heart bear the burden of a complete loss? (More on my thoughts on an afterlife later, it goes better with a different quote.)

"There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that in short, we are all going."

This seems to me to be what growing up is, and accepting the inevitable. It is that point when we realize our heroes are human, and so are we. That the flaws we thought were mountains are barely small enough to register in the grand scheme of things. It is that sense of oblivion and inevitability that truly lets us grow up, and though it seems like such a view would make life dark and dreary, i believe it makes it freer. Some things are going to happen. Some things cannot be stopped. We can only do the best we can and make the most of each day because without that joy, what is left? Only the darkness one first sees when beholding this inevitable view.

"And now she was colder by the hour, more dead with every breath I took. I thought: That is the fear: I have lost something important and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without." 

But, Miles, the glasses would come back. They can make more glasses. There is no more Alaska. She is nowhere you can reach her, nowhere you can speak to her and hear her respond, nowhere to look at her and discover her like you never did when she was alive. There are only the clues she left behind, evidence, memories, scraps of conversation. That's loss isn't it? Even if not to death. Even if they move away, or the relationship just falls apart. All of a sudden you're left realizing all the parts of them you never knew. All the parts, good and bad, that went unrecognized. And perhaps, that's the nature of relationships. Perhaps, if we truly knew each others' minds, we wouldn't be able to stand it. Perhaps if we truly, entirely, knew someone, we'd die from the pain of having our own secrets known. Perhaps it is this point of unknowing that keeps the human race living and loving. For do we not all fear our own complexity?

"...that she and I had shared that alone, and I kept it for myself like a keepsake, as if sharing the memory might lead to its dissipation"

Only the most precious memories are like that. Only the memories of those we love. Perhaps it's a first kiss from someone you've cared for a long time. Perhaps it's remembering that smile. Perhaps it's every day they make you laugh. These memories feel as if they'd be lost in the sharing, and perhaps they would. Some secrets are meant to be kept.

"'He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at last reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. "Damn it," he sighed. "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?"'"

This question permeates the novel, a quote from one of Alaska's books. How do we get out of the labyrinth that is life? How do we ensure that in the race between our misfortunes and our dreams, that the right one comes out on top? What is the point of it all if the end is only darkness? John Green, you've made me question life itself. Though not the ending, more the in between. I think the question is less what we can do to get out and more what can we do to make it all worth it? There is no way out of the labyrinth, but there can be joy within it.

"A woman so strong she burns down heaven and drenches hell."

The story preceding this quote describes a story of a woman who wished people to love God because He is God, and not for "want of heaven or fear of hell." This is the truth of everything these days: why can we not love something simply for its own sake and not for what it can give or take away? This is at the core of the nature of love. It is a passion so strong, something so firm, and no matter what it does to you, it cannot disappear, for you know what you feel in your heart and it can't be let go. It cannot be changed or moved by giving or taking, only by betrayal, because it is who they are or what it is that you love, and not anything it does for you. Although perhaps all we can know of a love is that, what they can give and take, because we cannot see inside another's mind and we do not know. Perhaps all we can see of another is what they do for us, but I do not believe that to be so, and even if it is, I do not believe that is real love. It could be that the truest kind of love depends not at all on reciprocation of feeling, but rather stands on its own. The truest kind of love is a foundation on which everything can depend.

"...we must look so lame, but it doesn't much matter when you have just now realized, all this time later, that you are still alive."

Life has significance. Living, moving, breathing, interacting- all these things have greater weight than we could ever comprehend, and it is only occasionally that we even come close, and it is those moments when the heart seems the biggest. It is then that we realize what is truly important and what we must do. This, truly, is the acceptance of the inevitable that seems so dark upon first beholding. Accepting what will happen, and knowing it is an incredible gift, this life, and that everything that happens is not by chance. People cross our paths for a reason and it's up to us to figure out why because what else can we do? We are here to live and to love and to make memories. I believe that to be true. We are here in this life, this great gift, this Great Perhaps, to find our own joy. All we must do is take the road that lies before us and journey on into the sun.

The last section of the book is an essay by Miles, and I hope you'll forgive me for typing it out after you've already read so far, but I believe it needs to be read. It truly is the sum of my experience in the book.

"Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied by only the last words of the already-dead, so I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life. And then I screwed up and he screwed up and we screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And there’s no sugar-coating it: She deserved better friends.

When she ****** up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it in spite of having lost her.

Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and him and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And here’s how I know:

I thought at first that she was dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something’s meal. What was her - green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs - would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke blowing out of some smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe ‘the afterlife’ is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled.

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take her genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.

Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science class is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if she took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself - those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us great than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison’s last words were: “It’s very beautiful over there.” I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful."

Because Alaska is dead and oblivion is inevitable and we are more than the sum of our parts. Because we, as humans, are as strong as we need ourselves to be, and there is nothing we cannot bear if we believe we can bear it. Because life is a gift, and the labyrinth is a Great Perhaps, and the ones we love are not truly gone, are never truly lost to us. Because forgiveness is the way free from pain and free to realizing our own potential, that potential which we fear above all else in this life.

That's Looking for Alaska.