Yes, yes. I know what you're thinking. "Not another
post about The Fault In Our flipping Stars," and I completely understand
as every time I turn around, I see someone sporting a "TFIOS" t-shirt
or yelling "okay" down the hall to their friends in reply to their
previously stated "okay." Everyone read the story about two
star-crossed lovers, destined to die at the hands of disease and the anguish of
being the one that lived. I love that story as much as the next girl, but I
hope I can expose the often overlooked side of this marvelous book.
Augustus Waters was obsessed with leaving his mark on the
world. He wanted everyone to remember him and sing songs about him and write
long novels concerning his various good deeds. His biggest fear was oblivion. Hazel, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared
less. She tread lightly on the earth, careful not to leave big of a “scar.” She
didn’t care about heroism and fame. She just wanted to love and be loved.
"'There will come a time when all of us are dead. All
of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to
remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There
will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you.
Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be
forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming
soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the
collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before
organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the
inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God
knows that's what everyone else does.'"
This quote reminds me of those posters you often see posted
in science classes. “You are here,” with an arrow pointing to a tiny speck in
the universe. This is very contradictory to what we have been raised to
believe. Humans are supposed to be at
the center of the universe. Everything we do is groundbreaking, breathtaking,
or just plain life changing. Everything we said or do or make is going to last
forever and ever and ever. But it’s not. John Green forces us to except our
mortality. We are just a speck. We are insignificant to the grand scheme. Life
is so much bigger than us.
While this may be uncomfortable for someone like Augustus to
think about, for Hazel, it’s comforting. She finds solace in the idea that she
doesn’t matter. She’s a casualty of cancer, but everyone else is a casualty of
oblivion and forgotten hopes and dreams.
I like the passage you chose. It really is amazing to think about how small and insignificant we really are. I also love the "you are here" picture you posted, it made me laugh because it's so very true!
ReplyDeleteI think about this very thing all the time, often when I am near large bodies of water. I guess all we can do is make our little speck in the universe a good one, a productive one, one that mattered to us and maybe mattered to a few others. I read this book in one day on the beach in Mexico and then had to write about it: http://nestingnotions.blogspot.com/2013/03/deep-beach-read.html
ReplyDeleteBeing drug to this movie, i thought it wasn't horrible but i wasn't gonna actually read the book. But actually, what you stated is what i took from the movie. i realized that life is something people take advantage of. People coast through just wanting to grow up. So where does that leave all of us? Another body under the ground after death? I think that people need to try to make more of themselves than doing nothing and just blowing through life as someone to conform to society and live life how we want. Life is ours for the taking. dont let it slip away
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