Looking for Alaska

by John Green

I ran out of the room, like I’d never smoked a cigarette, like I ran with Takumi on Barn Night, across the dorm circle to his room, but Takumi was gone. His bunk was bare vinyl; his desk empty; an outline of dust where his stereo had been. 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.

Looking for Alaska still had a long way to go: There was no labyrinth of suffering in the manuscript that Julie first read, and no Great Perhaps. But Julie helped me to discover the novel I wanted to write—a story of what theologians call “radical hope,” the idea that hope is available to all of us at all times, even unto death.

But the weird thing about depression is that it tends to further isolate you from people, making it ever harder for anyone to bridge the gap and really hear you in the way you need to be heard. So it becomes progressively more difficult to feel that you aren’t alone with your pain, which can make the despair feel permanent and unsolvable. This is the most insidious thing about depression, I think: It makes itself more powerful by dragging you away from the world outside of yourself. So I don’t want to diagnose Alaska, but certainly she lives with terrible hurt, and I wanted us as readers to be able to glimpse that in ways that Pudge (and her other friends) fail to understand.