Turtles All the Way Down: <3
“We never really talked much or even looked at each other, but it didn’t matter because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe even more intimate than eye contact anyway. I mean, anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”
John Green carries me to an acute consciousness, which I think is very exacting to write. His writing flows. clear, transparent, and so full, simultaneously. Our protagonist Aza Holmes, who has some symptoms of OCD and anxiety, makes it her quest to track down a missing billionaire, who happens to be the father of a boy called Davis, a childhood friend of hers who she has slowly lost contact with. As intriguing as this synopsis initially appears, Turtles All the Way Down isn’t a book that stands out for its precarious plot. If you’re looking for a well-crafted plot, akin to nesting dolls (hollow wooden dolls placed one inside the other, decreasing in size, until the tiniest one is solid all the way through), then no, this book’s plot won’t blow you away.
There’s an expression in classical music. It goes, ‘We went out to the meadow.’ It’s for those evenings that can only be described in that way. There were no walls, there were no music stands, there weren’t even any instruments. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, we all went out to the meadow. It describes a feeling.
— Tom Waits
In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It was like we weren’t even there, lying together by the pool. It felt like we were in some place your body can’t visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments.
Reading John Green is a feeling of going out to the meadow. It is a feeling of growing up, when the flaws and cracks of the world are just starting to arrive into the space which is your attention, even when all along, we have been cognitively aware of their existence. Yet we are naïve, because we have never truly experienced those circumstances of the world. And these circumstances happen irrespective of how we feel, entirely beyond our control.
You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.
Reading John Green is a feeling of falling in love again for the first time, at first slowly and carefully. Afterwards, being awfully stuck missing a person, even though it won’t turn out so terrible, because your now is not your forever. I think a part of you will always love that person, frozen in that moment in time, intact in memories, something precious nobody can ever take away.
Reading Turtles All the Way Down is deconstructing every little piece of who we are, and staring at our identities under a magnifying glass, trying to make sense of how different pieces fit — and how we fit — into the world.
It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else — in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.
We did love each other — maybe we never said it, and maybe love was never something we were in, but it was something I felt. I loved him, and I thought, maybe I will never see him again, and I’ll be stuck missing him, and isn’t that so terrible.
And reading John Green is discovering yourself all again, and discovering the world both under a telescope and under a microscope, lost in the centre of the spiral and far, far away from the spiral where it grows infinitely large.
But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same person if she has a boyfriend or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?
John Green’s writing elegantly melds our personal stories and narratives with some form of collective knowledge. If someone has a mental illness, what separates their diagnosed disease from their identity and personality? If our microbiota in our gut-brain axis influences emotional and cognitive centers of the brain, then are we ‘us’, or are we a product of bacteria? Who are we, but our circumstances? Why do we warrant a scientific explanation of the world, when the Earth rests on the giant back of a turtle, on the back of another one, and it’s turtles all the way down?
The problem with happy endings, is that they’re either not happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And eventually you die. You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don’t choose what’s in the picture, but you decide on the frame.
