Who People Are

I've been reading a lot of Young Adult (YA) fiction recently, just to see what it's like - books such as the Hunger Games trilogy, the Divergent trilogy, The Bell Jar, and three titles by John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns. It's been a great ride. And I've especially enjoyed the story telling techniques of John Green. I loved the characters in his tale about young cancer kids, The Fault in Our Stars (made into a major motion picture), but really disliked the bleak philosophy that he chose to put in, underlying it, a world view which was too easy for the narrative, and in my view, unearned. An Abundance of Katherines is about a road trip two friends take, driving the interstate from Chicago, and they end up in Tennessee. One of them has only dated girls named Katherine. Until now. Hence the title.

Perhaps the most interesting of Green's books is Paper Towns (soon to be released as a major motion picture), set in Orlando. A group of high school seniors is approaching prom and graduation. The narrator is one of them, and is smitten with a girl in his class he's known since elementary school. But he's a geek, and she's super popular, and he mostly views her from afar, until these last days of school, when she suddenly includes him as her driver and support on a long night of revenge pranks aimed toward the boyfriend who has cheated on her, and the girl who lured him away, along with anyone who likely knew and didn't tell her what was going on. She turns out to be a master of the grand gesture and the intricately magnificent prank. She's courageous, intelligent, over-the-top creative, and stunningly beautiful, and our narrator falls deeply in love with her. Or does he? She suddenly disappears, leaving home and school with no explanation, but she sprinkles what look like clues around the neighborhood, using Woody Guthrie lyrics, Bob Dylan songs, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as sources of code and dark hints that seem to point toward an impending suicide. There is a desperate search on the part of the narrator and his best friends, a wild road trip from Orlando up I-95 to New York State, and unexpected discoveries that surprise the reader as much as the kids.

The main theme of the story seems to be as important as it is simple.

We often think we know who people are, and in reality we've just been misled by surface appearances. We come to love, or admire, or respect, or resent, or despise mere caricatures that we mistake for real people. We judge books by their covers, people by their appearances, and situations by their most obvious, and often misleading, interpretations. We think we know, when we don't. We rush, then jump, to conclusions in ways that can eat up our time and mess up our lives.

The book's narrator learns, and shows us, the wisdom of not rushing to judgment or letting our emotions dash about on their own, disconnected from the true realities to which they should be responding. I came away from the book with a renewed sense of the importance of pausing, waiting, and looking twice before passing judgment too quickly on anything that catches my eye. Not a lot in this world is exactly what it at first seems.

Wisdom is not easily misled by surface appearances. Wisdom digs deep. It embraces truth. It can wait to see what's what.

Paper Towns was a fun read, and insightful. You might enjoy it as a light summer book. Click on the title to see it on Amazon.

The Fault in Our Thoughts

I wrote a couple of days ago about discovering the Young Adult mega hit novel, The Fault in Our Stars. I had heard about the author and his legendary editor, and just wanted to see what the two of them had come up with that was such a blockbuster. I first noticed the exceedingly advanced vocabulary of the main characters, the 16 year old Hazel and her 17 year old boyfriend, Augustus. Today, I want to look briefly at their thoughts about life and the world.

In a cancer support group for young people, before Hazel and Augustus had actually met, the leader asked the group what they most feared. Augustus, the new "hot boy" in the room who had already caught Hazel's eye, answered, "Oblivion." Hazel could not contain herself and lectured him, as she recounts:

“There will come a time, when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let along you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this” - I gestured encompassingly - “will have been for naught. Maybe the time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was a time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be a time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.” (13)

Augustus introduces himself, and they fall in love. Who could resist a girl with such an attractive worldview? I'm kidding. Hazel's words reflect a very famous and bleak passage in philosopher Bertrand Russell's old essay, A Free Man's Worship. Augustus later says to her:

"I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.” (153)

He even later reports a middle school science teacher's worldview with these words:

“You still secretly believe that there is an element of magic to this world? It’s all just soulless molecules bouncing off each other randomly.” 220

Hazel, toward the end of the book, writes: 

“We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness.” 266

Here's the problem. We know consciousness and conscious awareness first hand. We have ample experience of it. We have absolutely no experience of the eradication of awareness. By definition, we can't. And we have no compelling evidence or proof of any sort that any instance of human consciousness, or animal awareness, for that matter, is doomed to extinction. But the fashionable nihilism of this captivating book relentlessly assumes the most reductionistic implications of modern science, with hardly a speck of acknowledgement that a hopeless, grim worldview is, as philosophers say, "severely underdetermined" by the facts we do have.

Biological life in this world surely ends. And all the bodies with brains, and the means of expressing the awareness that has been mediated through those brains, eventually cease to function. But we actually have no idea what happens to the consciousness that has occurred in connection with the functioning of those brains, from these facts alone. Reductionism holds that there is no existence of consciousness apart from the functioning of complex brains. But that is just as much an article of faith as anything can be.

At one point, the slightly older Augustus actually reveals that he suspects there is Something, or Somewhere for us after death. Hazel is quite surprised to hear this coming from such an otherwise obviously smart guy. She says:

“I’d always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement.” (168)

And yet, her father later says this to her, after admitting he doesn't quite know what to believe about such ultimate issues as afterlife:

“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it - or my observation of it - is temporary?” (223)

And that's about as positive a view as is ever expressed in the book. Augustus, though, seems to have glimpses of something big, and important, and heroic about our life under the admittedly challenging conditions that surround us. At one point, he says:

“Everyone wants to lead an extraordinary life.” (169)

And he seems to suspect, deep down, that, maybe, any heroism or extraordinariness that we do attain in this world connects up to something bigger, something he can't quite define or describe. And I suspect that he's right.

In my view, the contemporary fault in our thoughts is to merely assume any such suspicions are no more than wishful thinking, and that nothing more is possible, beyond the physical matter and energy that we can discover through our physical tools of observation. The flaw in our thoughts is to embrace such a bleak and reductionistic worldview as unavoidable, when the real mysteries of consciousness themselves may be small apertures into far greater mysteries that can invite us to rethink our lives more deeply. Anything that prevents our trying is a deep fault, and flaw, indeed.

The Fault In Our Stars

In the New York Times the other day, I read about a famous Young Adult book editor at Dutton who gives her authors 20 pages of harsh critique on their manuscripts, and they cry, and then revise, and get bestselling results. She has more bestsellers, apparently, than anyone else. John Green, author of the mega hit book The Fault in Our Stars, now a major motion picture, as they say, is one of her authors. And so when I saw his popular book on a used book table in an airport bookstore this week, I bought it to find out how mega bestselling books are written - something a philosopher would not know. I promise you that. And I read it on the airplanes of the week.

The book is good. I recommend it. It's a story about two teenagers in Indiana who have cancer and fall in love. The girl, Hazel, who is 16, loves a book once written by a reclusive novelist who now lives in Amsterdam. She's read it over and over. She meets a boy, Augustus Waters, when he visits her support group for cancer kids. He's hot, so they talk, and he decides to read the book she loves so much. And then, Spoiler Alert, he uses his "Wish" (for very sick kids to have special experiences) to taker her to meet her hero, the author of her favorite book, in Amsterdam. They find that the man is quite different from what they expect. But despite their disappointment in that main facet of the trip, love blossoms. Then: Someone dies. And the nature of our universe is prodded and pondered.

It's a surprisingly philosophical novel. And, again, I liked it. But do you remember how the characters in the hit tv show Dawson's Creek used to talk like graduate students, instead of the high schoolers they were supposed to be? Ok maybe you didn't watch. Well. These characters, the girl 16, and the boy 17, talk and think more like exaggerated versions of Ivy League professors.

Hazel, the girl, speaks with words like: veritably, decrepit, horrifically, toroidal, disheartening, dysmorphia, incessantly, feign, taut, catastrophic, hamartia (the ancient Greek word for sin), gutted, ludicrous, flummoxed, gratuitous, luminous, and indefatigable, as well as in phrases like “waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles.”

She thinks, and narrates to us, with words like rapture, sedentary, ferocity, tenuous,  misnomered, elicit, coterie, irreconcilably, succulently, malevolent, encroached, transfigured, commiserate, cloyingly, prematorium, eponymous, irrevocably, rotundity, labyrinthine, and lumen, and also in phrases like “the tears not like tears so much as a quiet metronome,” and “existentialist experiment,” and “a bodily sovereignty,” and again, “existential curiosity,” and “a quantum entanglement,” and “the sound of a parent’s annihilated voice,” and “depraved meaninglessness,” as well as, finally, “the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.” Do sixteen-year-olds ever actually go around talking and thinking like this, anywhere other than the Indiana of the book?

Augustus, the 17 year old boy, and former high school basketball player, speaks with words like sacrality, trope, perseverant, eviscerated, and self-aggrandizing, and with phrases like “The day of existentially fraught free throws,” “the men and women who wait like Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot,” and “awash in the nobility of sacrifice,” and again, “awash in the metaphorical resonance,” or “the Whitmanesque revelation,” and “the terrible ferocity,” and “the incessant mechanized haranguing.”

But they also curse in really normal curse words, and Hazel often agrees with Augustus in the new faddish phrase, "I know, right?" And she eventually describes her formerly admired novelist as "the world's douchiest douche." (184) So there is quite a dynamic spectrum of language represented in the book.

Hazel's really popular fashionista high school friend, Kaitlin, uses phrases like "preemptive dumping,” and “lascivious details,” and speaks of “unconscionable” luck. And then she buys lots of cute shoes.

Parents occasionally speak professorially, but not nearly as well as the kids. A nurse gives an abstract of the news that sounds like something Jon Stewart might do after getting his own PhD in pop culture.

The prose of the book is sometimes really really aggressively MFA (Master of Fine Arts degree). And some of the ideas are, as well. But it's all very clever, despite striking me as incredibly unrealistic. Of course, maybe that's just me. I've never been around kids who ate dictionaries for breakfast and alphabet soup for lunch.

But I think the author does a good job of bringing up some big issues about life, death, disease, afterlife, consciousness, fairness, fate, and honesty that we all need to contemplate. I think I will contemplate them with you some tomorrow, or the next day. If you've read The Fault in Our Stars, let me know what you think.

So maybe I know now, indisputably, irrevocably, and inerrantly, if not sublimely, what it takes to write a Number One New York Times bestseller. I've got to practice my prolixity, at least enough for the inexorable to occur.