Looking for Alaska

by John Green

I 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?”

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.

Alyeska.

‘that which the sea breaks against,’

“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.” I guess that made sense. I had imagined

“Auden,”

“You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart,” I read aloud. “Yeah. That’s pretty good,” I said.

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.

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.

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.

I’d rather wonder than get answers I couldn’t live with.

The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we’d learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did.

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...

But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.

Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible”

Harvey.” He’d been bothering me for years to watch this

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. I hope you like this little book. If you do,

I don’t think we feel only one thing in our lives. I don’t think it’s as simple as either (a) being in love or (b) not being in love. I think our feelings for each other are really complicated and motivated by an endless interconnected web of desires and fears. I wanted to reflect that as best I could.

The truth is that in our lives we are all going to encounter questions that should be answered, that deserve to be answered, and yet prove unanswerable. Can we find meaning to life without those answers? Can we find a way to acknowledge the reality (and injustice) of suffering without giving in to hopelessness? Those are the questions I think Miles is confronting at the end, and I wanted to argue that through forgiveness, it is possible to live a full and hopeful life—even if our world is saturated with injustice and loss.

As Faulkner famously put it, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

I wanted Pudge to believe in the value of dying declarations as a way of closing the book on a human life, but then to be denied that closure when it comes to the death of someone he loves. He has to live with not knowing—not knowing her last words, and more importantly

not knowing whether she committed suicide. I wanted the story to explore whether it is possible to live a hopeful life when you so often do not get answers to questions that deserve answers.

radical hope—the belief that hope is available to all people at all times—possibly even including the dead.

Basically, I wanted to think about all kinds of different ways that young people respond thoughtfully to loss and grief, and show a bunch of different ways that people can prove resilient.

physical intimacy isn’t and can never be an effective substitute for emotional intimacy.

Looking back, I was really struggling in the years after college. I felt lost and intensely alone. And for me Alaska was a way to write about the feelings of abandonment and the challenges of living with ambiguity and regret. In that sense, it was a very personal novel,

written not only toward the me I was in high school, but also the me who was writing it.