Looking for Alaska: a great perhaps
I feel like I’ve been trying to formulate this book review for an hour, and I’m just going to be accommodating of how rusty and stale my writing comes across right now instead of aiming for perfection. There are inevitable components of the book that I will give away. Ladies and gentlemen, Looking for Alaska.
Looking for Alaska explores the biggest concepts over a short academic year. “Pudge” (our main character) candidly tells the tale of loving, losing, death, grief, the comedown of closure, how we can make it out of the labyrinth of suffering, and having enough faith to leap into the Great Perhaps. He meets Alaska Young, who comes off as such an electric person. Everything happens so quickly, from when the sun goes away in the autumn, to when leaves trickle down from the trees, all the way to the closure of the school year as we approach summer on the horizon.
Post-grief, Pudge lives in déjà vu’s as the world synchronously and rhythmically repeats, and he steps through time and attempts to uncover the cause of Alaska’s absence in circular motions. There is not even a numeric scale to rank the complexity of closure, and that every day forwards, simply with time, it just occurs.
Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.” That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.
We live life for a Great Perhaps. Maybe there is also an ounce in us that wants to keep taking risks. Maybe the universe is written out already, and all we have to do is uncover it, flipping through it page by page, and have more faith than we think we’re capable as we go through the process. There is so much that is unknown in the world, and sometimes knowing that some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved is enough. But it doesn’t mean that we cannot try, even if there is no answer, and we fail in the end.
“Don’t you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don’t love the crazy, sullen bitch.”
And there was something to that, truth be told.
This was a candid quote when Alaska was explaining love to Pudge in the middle of flashbacks and breakdowns, explaining how not all of her is lovable. Sometimes I wonder if we pick and choose the people who we afford humanness, and decide who is worthy and not by sifting through traits and categorizing people into parts. Why cannot we let someone be worthy of love and respect just because they are alive? Do they have to bring or contribute something? Through that judgment, we block us from giving the same kindness to ourselves, and wholly accept ourselves for just existing.
But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. 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.
And maybe that’s what Pudge is explaining here. Maybe we have something that is not just deconstructed, components of us. Maybe we are more than the sum of our parts. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.
I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.
The Buddha said that 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.
