Looking for Alaska

by John Green

“François Rabelais. He was this poet. And his last words were ‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps.’

I sank my teeth into the crunchy shell of my first bufriedo and experienced a culinary orgasm.

must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?”

The nature of the labyrinth, I scribbled into my spiral notebook, and the way out of it.

I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”

The final exam: What is the most important question human beings must answer? Choose your question wisely, and then examine how Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity attempt to answer it.

How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?”

“You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart,”

Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible. The plan may have had faults, but we did not.

“We are all going,” McKinley said to his wife, and we sure are. There’s your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. Find your way out of that maze.

We left. We did not say: Don’t drive. You’re drunk. We did not say: We aren’t letting you in that car when you are upset. We did not say: We insist on going with you. We did not say: This can wait until tomorrow. Anything—everything—can wait.

thought: It’s all my fault. I thought: I don’t feel very good. I thought: I’m going to throw up.

I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.

“Straight and fast. Straight and fast. Out of the labyrinth.”

How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? —A. Y.

For she had embodied the Great Perhaps—she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps.

‘Everything that comes together falls apart,’”

When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did.

She didn’t leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.

It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.

What is your cause for hope?”

He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.

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.