Book Review #3: Looking for Alaska
This book reflects the author’s enchantment to life and death “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?"
“What happens...to us...when we die?”
It also exemplify Green’s rhetorical used of metaphors.
…
Miles also known as Pudge (because of the Colonel’s fondness to irony) loves to read biographies and tend to memorize dying conviction of the one’s he’s reading.
His living on a context that doesn’t suit him, that’s why he manage to get out by transferring to another school. Here he met new friends and involved on doing reckless things.
His roommate Colonel, is a pure showman. Very courageous one, who dares to meddle by howling ridiculous words on a basketball match of their rivals (he’s not a player though). I love how straightforward he is and at the same time, he’s a trusted friend.
Alaska on the other hand was oftentimes the mastermind of “plan”, oftentimes, a disastrous one. She loath rich kids, that’s why, they’re always her target or at times, doing such “plan” for the joy it brings to her.
Eventhough how very out-going Alaska appears to be, she especially love reading and a certified bibliophile:
“Oh God no. I've maybe read a third of 'em. But I'm going to read them all. I call it my Life's Library. Every summer since I was little, I've gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.”
As the number slowly diminish (in terms of the chronological narration), is the bang explosion of Alaska’s out of the blue aggressiveness to go somewhere and ended up:
“I could try to pretend that I didn't care anymore, but it could never be true again. You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I can't remember, because I never knew.”
“It—just as the Colonel had said at the funeral that she wasn't there, wasn't anywhere. I couldn't honestly imagine her as anything but dead, her body rotting in Vine Station, the rest of her just a ghost alive only in our remembering.”
“Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.”
“I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe “the afterlife” is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled.”
“If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed”
Favorite highlighted passages:
•I learned that myth doesn't mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred.
•Buddhist belief in being present for every facet of your daily life, of being truly present. Be present in this class. And then, when it's over, be present out there.
•I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're gonna do. I'm just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.
•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.”
•Big white whale is a metaphor for everything. You live for pretentious metaphors.
•The miracle, at least in that time and in that place, was that Jesus—a peasant, a Jew, a nobody in an empire ruled exclusively by somebodies—was the son of that God, the all-powerful God of Abraham and Moses. That God's son was not an emperor. Not even a trained rabbi. A peasant and a Jew. A nobody like you. While the Buddha was special because he abandoned his wealth and noble birth to seek enlightenment, Jesus was special because he lacked wealth and noble birth, but inherited the ultimate nobility: King of Kings.
•Just because they were interesting people doesn't mean I care to hear their musings on nighttime.
•Buddhists are more complicated—because of the Buddha's doctrine of anatta, which basically says that people don't have eternal souls. Instead, they have a bundle of energy, and that bundle of energy is transitory, migrating from one body to another, reincarnating endlessly until it eventually reaches enlightenment.
• I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers—where you just repeat what you've already said with phrases like In summation, and To conclude. I didn't do that—instead I talked about why I thought it was an important question. People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.
•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. 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.
•But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.
•Edgar Allan Poe's last words (for the record: “Lord help my poor soul”)
•There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.
•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.
•I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.
•Everything that comes together falls apart.
•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.
•Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.
