I Suppose This Will Be Piecemeal

“I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY” (Orwell 68)

I think this constitutes one of the major difference between the two novels.  In The Hunger Games Collins demonstrates the WHY continuously, why the Districts aren’t allowed communication, why they are ruled so tightly by the Capital: They once revolted and it resulted in the purported decimation of District 13.  In a post-apocalyptic world, the need for strict regulation and law-abiding order makes a certain amount of sense.  Granted, the Capital has clearly gone over board, but nonetheless, the seed, the WHY is demonstrated.  The HOW is a little bit muddier until the third book, and even then not entirely clarified.

Orwell takes a different approach.  London, 1984, is deep in a war that has been raging for decades but not exactly generations.  The main character speaks with some pale, but nonetheless existing memories of other times.  Of time before war was quite so ubiquitous.  He works for the Party that he secretly hates and journals to that extent.  His role is to aid in the recreation of the past, taking articles in which the details need to be changed in order to satisfy the current movement and alliances.  To maintain perpetual intelligence and honesty, the past is altered to agree with the present, instead of the present seeking to realize the promises of the past.  It is as if he serves a party that wishes for time to move backwards.

         

I recently began reading 1984 by George Orwell, at long last, yes.  I have been told for many years that I needed to read it, but I never managed to come into possession of a copy until yesterday.  I began reading today and I was immediately struck by the echoes I felt to The Hunger Games trilogy.  Really, the echoes should go the other way, since Orwell wrote long before Collins, but due to the order I am reading them, the reverse will have to do.

Both books deal with central governments that have established themselves as overwhelming powers.  Overwhelming not only in that they serve to run large swathes of country, but also in that they overwhelm the individual identities of the citizens to the point of near uniformity.  Collins grants some uniquenesses between the Districts, Orwell between occupations, but both share the shadow of disturbing propaganda geared to affect a singular mode of thought.

            I have only begun, but I am interested to see where this all leads.  More to come. 

The Fault of Beauty, Life, and Death

If you have not read The Fault in Our Stars yet, be aware that there is some level of spoilage that will occur in this reaction.  It is not a review, perse, but merely an essay of sorts that attempts to wrestles with one of the issues brought up by the story.  If you would like to proceed with reading the novel with no spoilers, do not read this reaction.  I offer this disclaimer in deference to those like myself who like to enter a book without the preconceptions many reviews foist upon us.  

This book, I have heard, is beautiful.  That it made readers cry.  That they can’t wait to read it again.  That it is John Green at his best.

It surely made me cry, and in the midst of those tears choke out an uncomfortable guffaw of laughter at the inescapable humor of adolescence. 

                                                                                        

But beautiful?  Somehow this description seems odd.

Yes, it is beautifully written; there are sentences and whole passages that I copied over into my commonplace book (yes, a relic from a time before owning personal copies of books was ubiquitous).  But as a whole, how can a book that makes us cry at the tragedy of cancer taking the lives of young people before they have had time to live as long as so many of us be called beautiful?

Is it the tragedy that is beautiful?  The suffering?  The love that Hazel and Augustus create?  What is it we are in fact calling beautiful, and more important, why?

Even if you, as a reader, defend the notion that the beautiful part of The Fault in Our Stars is the romance of Hazel and Augustus, you are perpetuating the idea that tragic, suffering love is beautiful. 

Was it beautiful when Augustus thought Hazel was going to die in the ICU and the only way he could see was to sneak in for a mere ten minutes?

Is it beautiful to be denied access to the one you love when their life is in jeopardy?

Was it beautiful when Hazel found Augustus in a pool of his own urine and she couldn’t do anything about it because the effort of moving him and removing the soiled sheets was beyond what her lungs could grant her strength to do?

Is it beautiful to stand by and watch helplessly while someone else tends to the person you love?

These are scenes of love at some of their ugliest moments.  They are tragic moments that make us cry. 

They are moments most of us will never face. 

Till Death Do Us Part is a clause in the marriage vow that only the about 50% of marriages that persist will ever face.  These days, only 59% of people in the US will get married, leaving a vague total of 29% of the population in successful marriages.  Of that 29%, there is only a grand total of approximately 15% of the entire population that will survive their spouse.  15% of the entire population of the United States that makes it to Death Do Us Part.

Augustus and Hazel, at sixteen and seventeen years old, make it to Death Do Us Part.

To say this book is beautiful is to perpetuate the construction of celebrated sorrow and suffering.  We are a culture, a world, that mourns, and we believe we do that beautifully.  So in saying this book is beautiful, are we really saying it makes us mourn beautifully for Augustus and Hazel? 

Because that is a selfish beauty.  That is a beauty that treats this book like a reflective surface that merely serves to show us how we look when we suffer vicariously through fictional characters.  Yes, it’s a work of fiction, but it is a work of fiction drawn from the uncomfortable truths of tragedy.

Love is genuinely beautiful.  And Augustus doesn’t see, until he is faced with the inescapable promise of death, that that beauty, the beauty of honest and earnest love, is worth the charade of what we believe is beautiful sorrow.  There is no beauty in leaving someone you love behind by choice.  Monica shows us that by leaving Isaac.  There is no beauty in that, only cowardice.

Sorrow, or suffering, isn’t beautiful.  The world isn’t made any more beautiful for having experienced it. Hazel knows this when she rightly says the taste of broccoli in no way effects the taste of chocolate.  But, the sadness left in the wake of loss that comes hand in hand with sorrow and suffering reminds us that there is beauty in the rest of the world.  That there is beauty in the content of the scar that is left behind.

We cling to sorrow and mourning because it is the sequel we want but will never get.  We mourn because no matter how beautiful the rest of our story is, it is the next story, the story that happens after the one we cherished has ended.

No one is ever taken from us at the right time; it is always the wrong time to lose people we love. 

I thought I would want to read this book in the peaceful glow of early morning sunrise reflecting off fresh snow.  But I began reading around eleven pm and simply could not stop.  This is a story that refuses to pause.  Hazel does not get to pause; Augustus does not get to pause.  The short episode of their truncated love story is the pause they receive together in the midst of the crushing shadow of terminal illness. 

The world is broken; the world has faults.  But so do the stars.  And they are beautiful.

Yes, that is a Rubik's Cube clock. And a Swedish flag.

         I am sitting here at my desk with the long awaited, signed The Fault in Our Stars staring me in the face.  As soon as the title was announced and became available for pre-order, I pre-ordered, listing my parents’ address as the shipping address since I didn’t know where I would be living at the end of the anticipated year of anticipation.  As all now know, the publication date was bumped up and I can now read this lovely novel five months before I thought I would be able to.  

            But I find myself unable to crack it open.  I anxiously creeped out my parents’ front door before I left Chicago to return to the house I actually pay to live in here in Michigan, hopping from foot to foot in hopes of catching the UPS man in time to take the book with me.  When I couldn’t put off leaving any longer, I drove back up north and waited for my mom to overnight the book to me.  It arrived at the same time as another oddly related token that I never anticipated receiving.  I wanted to read it right away, but I was in the middle of At Home, by Bill Bryson.  I knew I didn’t want TFiOS to be a book I read as an interjection to another book, so I forced myself to set it aside until I finished Bryson’s investigation of the evolution of private life.  Such as it was, I read 300 pages of nonfiction, wide-ranging world history today so that I could be well positioned to read John Green’s acclaimed story.

            What I am surprised to find is that in the 24 hours since I received the book, I went from ravenously hungry to read it, to unprepared, nervous, hesitant, and nearly desperate.  John has put so much of himself into this book, so many years, so many experiences, that I want to treat it with the respect it deserves.  I can absolutely devour books.  Run through them quickly and with just as much enjoyment as those I read slowly.  It is a slightly different enjoyment, but both still hold vast amounts of pleasure for me.

            This novel was at least a decade in the making.  It was widely celebrated before it was even released.  To avoid spoilers of any kind, I have avoided nearly all reviews of any kind.  But now, with it sitting in front of me, knowing that there are many people out there who have read the book already.  Some before the book was even supposed to be sold, I want to wait.  How long, I don’t know.  But I don’t want it to be just another title on the long list of books I have read recently.  This book is different.  Just from the two chapters John has already read to Nerdfighteria and the world, I know this.  Perhaps it is this already present but minimal familiarity that gives me pause.  I have the smallest glimpse of Hazel and Augustus already. 

            It reminds me of meeting someone truly fascinating for the first time, but having only the briefest of conversations.  A number of years ago, this happened to me.   I met a boy who immediately struck me.   He is an odd duck, to say the least, but an imminently interesting duck nonetheless.  We chatted about the relative merits of Vermont versus Wisconsin cheddar and then didn’t have a real conversation again until a few days later.  I couldn’t shake him from my mind, and the intervening days between those early conversations were exciting and uncomfortable.  I would see him around and cast about for something to talk about, but when my mind drew a blank time after time, I just found someway to make myself busy so he wouldn’t think I was an uninteresting lump with nothing to say to him. 

           

We eventually found things to talk about and have remained friends ever since, but those few days before our friendship really took off evoked the same kind of thrilling timidity I am experiencing right now.  I’ve anticipated new books before, but they were always longer; I knew that the reading of the text would last longer than a day or two.  TFiOS doesn’t have that kind of girth, which is fine.  John’s the kid of writer that can say as much in 313 pages as much as other authors say in 1,000.  He just has that knack for saying the right thing in the right way more often than others usually do.

The story will stay with me, I’m sure, long after the reading has ended, but there is something special about the first time you read a book.  You can never read the same words in the same order in the same way once you’ve read them once.  All subsequent experiences are colored by that first read.  Which is why spoilers can be so disastrous to people who approach books with the same frantic shyness I am feeling at the moment.  I have avoided spoilers simply by not looking for any, so I am entering this reading experience with as much a clean slate as I could reasonably hope for. 

Perhaps I just wish there were someone here in town I could talk to about the novel once I have read it.  With some many people reading at different paces, I hesitate to participate in commentary on the book knowing that the things I have to say could color the initial reading experience I myself have tried to maintain.   Truly, I can’t speak to how I will want to participate in any discussion until I have actually read the thing.

And now, in the quiet softness of newly fallen snow, with a nosy kitten for company, gently caffeinated, and happily fed, I think I am ready.