Revisiting Looking for Alaska
Ten years ago, I was fourteen years old, a freshman in high school, and reading John Green’s Looking for Alaska for the first time. This Sunday, I turn twenty-four, the same age as John when he began writing his debut novel. To reflect on the last decade and celebrate Pizzamas, I decided to reread and reengage with Looking for Alaska.
I realize that I don’t need to review this book. Everyone has read it. (Everyone my age, at least.) I will say it’s remarkable how different I am now and how different John feels to me. In the past decade, John has become a household name from his literary pursuits, but those of us in the Nerdfighter community know him as a teacher, a philanthropist, and a friend. To say that I have felt guided by John is an understatement. The community he and Hank have built has allowed me to accept myself at my nerdiest, challenge my beliefs and implored me to decrease world suck. To me, John is like the wise Old Man, Dr. Hyde, albeit much younger, with both lungs and significantly sillier.
Looking for Alaska was released in 2005 but didn’t make its way into my hands until 2012. The way I engaged with Looking for Alaska at fourteen was like the way I engaged with other iconic YA novels, (ex.the Perks of Being a Wallflower): I found a character I related to, I understood the plot, I took the instructions, and I memorized the tumblr-esque quotes. I didn’t truly contemplate the questions John posed in the novel, let alone hold myself responsible for answering them.
Dr. Hyde, the religious studies teacher, asks his class on the first week of school, “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?”
Later, Alaska reads Simon Bolivar’s fictionalized famous last words from The General in His Labyrinth; she reads, “He- that’s Simon Bolivar—was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. ‘Damn it,’ he sighed, ‘how will I ever get out of this labyrinth.’” To which the question of the labyrinth is posed, “is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape- the world or the end of it?” Through contemplation, Alaska develops the belief that the labyrinth is neither life nor death but is suffering.
In their religious studies class, Dr. Hyde assigns a paper worth 50% of their grade, the prompt asking each student “what is the most important question human beings must answer?” Naturally, Alaska’s question is “How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?”
After Alaska’s death, Dr. Hyde asks his students to write a paper on Alaska’s question and prompts them to find a cause for hope.
A twenty-four-year-old John Green asked these questions and attempted to answer them. I can’t pretend that a twenty-four-year-old me will be able to form a conjecture more insightful than those illustrated in Looking for Alaska, but I am willing to contemplate them and attempt to answer them and can say that I feel more prepared to do so now than at fourteen.
When Dr. Hyde poses the labyrinth question to his class, Pudge pushes the Colonel to write to which he replies, “After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out- but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.”
I like this sentiment. I’ve recovered enough to agree with this. In my life, I have suffered in the way that all human’s do, unique in my own way but obsolete in the eyes of the universe. Human suffering is not unique. My suffering is unique only to me, in that my experiences are mine and my feelings about them are mine to manage. The instances of my suffering graze the hands of those who love me: an example being when my cousin died at the young age of 31. My family grieved at the same time, but we did not grieve the same thing or in the same way. Each person grieving him mourned differently, as each person who knew him knew a different version of him. My experiences with him were not anyone else’s, my love for him was my own. The sorrow I felt extended into feeling sorrow for his son, my father, his father and everyone else that knew him. It wasn’t just loss for him that I felt, I was in pain knowing that everyone who knew him had lost him as well.
As most youths do, I often felt resentful when people extended their sympathy with phrases such as, “I understand what you’re going through” or “it will get easier.” Such promises felt like a lie, but now I know that they just aren’t true. Something not being true is different than something being a lie. People say they understand how you feel, but they can’t. Maybe they don’t realize, which keeps this belief from being a lie, but no one can possibly know how you feel. I’ve discovered “I understand how you feel” actually means, “I have also suffered, and I relate to your suffering. I hope that knowing how we both suffer is comforting to you.”
Through suffering, I’ve learned that “it will get easier” is also untrue. If “it” is life, it most certainly will not get easier, it will get different. Your suffering is not the chickenpox. You don’t catch it once and then become an unviable host for infection. Suffering is an ever-mutating flu, morphing into new forms with each season, some flu’s only lasting days, others being fatal. The thing is, you never know how serious the flu will be until you have it. Suffering could be a global pandemic or breaking a limb or losing a sibling. Suffering could also lack a definitive cause, you could just feel alone or lost and wander the labyrinth.
It would be too easy to say that the way out of the labyrinth is through loving. Loving and suffering are two sides of the same coin. It also doesn’t make sense to believe that by not loving, you will not suffer. To resent is to also suffer.
I can’t speak for how all humans came to be, but I know I was brought into this world to be a companion. My parents were young and planned to have me so that my older sister wouldn’t have to wander the labyrinth alone. It was a genius idea and has given my life a purpose; to hold hands with her and fight our way through the maze together. I was made to be hers and still could never attempt to understand her suffering. I have prayed to be able to take all her anguish and anxieties and let them fall onto my head so she would never have to feel them but that is not the nature of suffering. Her pain is not my pain nor is mine hers. Her suffering will cause me to suffer, my suffering will cause her to suffer. Loving and being loved is a guarantee to suffer.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been blessed with more siblings and friends and colleagues and peers and strangers and neighbors that I love. I love them even though I wasn’t brought into this world to love them, and it’s been a privilege to love them and to suffer by doing so. My deepest anxiety comes from knowing that I cannot hold hands with them all and go through the labyrinth together. All of our labyrinths are different, they require us to take separate routes and end at various stages. Even my older sister’s labyrinth has grown different from mine and I’ve found wandering these tunnels alone to be terrifying.
My hope comes from knowing that I’ll find people in various stages of the maze and be able to walk together for a little while. While they’re with me, I will protect them from isolation, and they will do the same for me. I can’t say that I know why we all must suffer this way, but I will say that my suffering is worth it because I have the opportunity to love. I chose to love widely for this reason. I hope to graze many hands, to love and lose many things, and to allow the blood of my heart to soak the labyrinth I roam.
John ends Looking for Alaska with the famous last words of Thomas Edison, which were: “It’s very beautiful over there.” He follows with his own gorgeous statement: “I don’t know where there is, but I believe it is somewhere, and I hope it is beautiful.” I’m going to piggyback this statement with some adjustments. I don’t know that there is somewhere, but I am going to spend my life hoping that there is. I know that one day I will be returned to dust, I just hope that the dust is returned to whom I belong to.
