An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

by Hank Green

I hated it because they asked the staff to treat it like their whole life rather than like a day job,

“God, I hope you don’t feel like you have to represent all black people with me,” I said. “I hope you’re not, like, careful all the time.” “No, April.” And then it was a long time before she continued. “I’m careful with you for different reasons.”

Much of the best art is about balancing between reflecting culture while simultaneously being removed from it and commenting on it.

Every culture has its ways of turning strangers into acquaintances. We don’t really think about these procedures; they just exist. And this process almost always begins either by telling someone your name or by having some third party introduce you. Which is why I replied to someone who had just yelled my own name at me by telling them what my name was.

“It will help you sway public opinion. Every person who reads your book will be far more likely to be on your side. Books are the most intensive of all current media. People are willing to spend hours and hours with a book. Additionally, people are still willing to pay for them.”

“Just because you can’t imagine something doesn’t mean you can’t do it,” he said.

Basically, do your best to mock and deride their connection to and appreciation of you because, deep down, you dislike yourself enough that you cannot imagine anyone worthwhile actually wanting to be with you. I mean, if they like you, there must be something wrong with them, right?

Imagine if you looked different to every person who saw you. Not, like, some people thought you were more or less attractive, but one person thinks you’re a sixty-five-year-old cowboy from Wyoming complete with boots and hat and leathery skin, and the next person sees an eleven-year-old girl wearing a baseball uniform. You have no control over this, and what you look like has nothing to do with the life you have lived or even your genome. You have no idea what each person sees when they look at you.

As you can imagine, this makes fame pretty disorienting. You never know who knows what. You never know if someone is looking at you because they think you’re attractive or because you went to college with them or because they’ve been watching your videos or listening to your music or reading about you in magazines for years. You never know if they know you and love you. Worse, you never know if they know you and hate you.

and instead of the grid was a phrase: “Fancy tulip man.”

But these are things you can’t really say in the face of tragedy.

The purity of my feelings for Carl was gone and I would never get it back.

They didn’t, not one single time, say, “What were you thinking?!” Not because they knew or because they understood—I really don’t think they did. They didn’t ask that because I sure as hell didn’t stab myself in the back, and when a radical extremist stabs someone in the back, the only person at fault is the radical extremist.

Because you like me, and no single person’s love can compete with even casual regard from a hundred million. That impossible, inhuman wave of support. Not inhuman because you aren’t humans, inhuman because no human is designed to process it, to understand it.

I realized that everyone, seeing only the darkness of my pocket on the livestream, heard me say those words. Even now, I was still thinking about the audience.

At that moment, a call came in from Miranda. OK. That had to be important. “I’m getting another call, be right back,” I said to the emergency response professional who was trying to save my life.

If you pay attention, there is only one story that makes sense, and that is one in which humanity works together more and more since we took over this planet.

could there be any time in history when what Carl is asking us would be more possible? Asking dozens of governments to take the same action simultaneously with an uncertain outcome?

The Carls in China and Russia that had military guards were each the scene of a mini riot. Only one person was killed, when a soldier in Chengdu opened fire on a growing crowd. Somehow, instead of scattering, the crowd closed in and the soldier stopped shooting.

‘Fame, after all, is but the sum of all the misunderstandings which gather about a new name.’

Carl was always a canvas on which people would project their values and their hopes and their fears. April is going to become that now.

April and I, alone in a hotel room, plotted to change her from a person into a story. It worked.

The most insidious part of fame for April wasn’t that other people dehumanized her; it was that she dehumanized herself.

Speaking to humans was so vastly different from tweeting or even making videos.