Okay

Listening to: Sailing Away by Standing Small

Line Obsession: "You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are." A Fault in Our Stars by John Green

I'm not yet sure how I feel about the whole of this book. It's deeply honest and moving and the characters while trying to be emotionally/mentally hard and strong are physically dying and I find beauty in this juxtaposition and the pathetic endurance going through the motions of these young lives. Lives that could be mine in a heartbeat.

Having said that. I freaked out this afternoon as I finally read something in this book that I could relate to on a personal level and not just a relational level. Hazel is at her boyfriend's funeral when she quotes Robert Frost's poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" (which is the one quoted by Pony and Jonny in The Outsiders) and anyone who knows me at all probably knows how much I cherish The Outsiders.

"It seemed to me that I had already seen everything pure and good in the world, and I was beginning to suspect that even if death didn't get in the way, the kind of love that Augustus and I share could never last. So dawn goes down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay."
-A Fault in Our Stars p.277
John Green

Looks like Jonny Cade had it right when he explicated the poem. When you're young everything is gold and new and then you have to grow up and die and nothing gold can stay.

And that's when I knew I could appreciate Hazel Grace as a character. She's not a pessimist. She's a dying teenager who is surrounded by the reality of life (or lack there of) and the all too present reality of death. She has never truly known life or love (although she assumes she has) and how can we blame her for her reactions to life and pain (both physical and emotional). No, I'm not sure what I think about the book yet. I certainly don't always agree with Green or his characters and many of their thoughts and actions make my heart ache. But I think it paints a beautiful picture of what it means to be sick and that really, we are all sick. We all lives either in a zombie trance or angry and bitter and we are broken and not whole. We are missing legs and lungs and eyes and don't know how to live our best lives today even if we try.

Therefore, above all else this book has offered me magnificent insight into the lives of people around me in all sorts of walks of life. Hopefully it will now be easier for me to sympathize and discern how to help try to encourage those around me. This is one of those books that I would not necessarily ever choose to read again but whose lessons will be carried with me for forever.

There's a reason I adore books with terrible tragedies attached and that's because they tend to be more real, more understandable, more heartfelt. Who doesn't relate to the feeling of Hazel just being tired of being sick and just wanting to be held and for everything to go back to when life was easier and full of joy?

Hazel Grace makes me so angry most of the time and yet I cannot help but want to sit there and hold her hand and cry with her over the injustices of life and the loss of our most precious possessions.