I’m setting out on a paper adventure.
I have not read The
Fault in Our Stars. I have not seen the movie either.
I’m reviewing it anyway. Daina reads John Green books as if
Guy Montag himself is about to storm our house to burn them.
Every once in a long season, a book gets you feeling
evangelical again about the power of a good story. You marvel at the author at
whose hands you find yourself feeling both helpless and superhuman at the same
time.
By the end of that book, a strange thing happens: someone
else’s words form within you something so perfectly inexplicable that you
suddenly have none of your own. You’re left empty and full all at once.
In that long season, wherein you have this sudden gift, you
understand how words can break a person. You want the entire world to read them
anyway because you know that an important part of being human is being
breakable. Without books like these, we risk being unbroken for too long. We
risk our ethical periphery someday shrinking to the size of a balance beam. We
risk finding ourselves seeing only ourselves and an occasional other exactly
like us.
I know The Fault in
Our Stars does this because I’ve seen it in my thirteen-year-old daughter.
I am torn between reading it because there are lines separating the goodness of
things you believe in so much you start selling them, the goodness of things
you value so much you don’t trust that others could ever care for them or
understand them the way you do, and finally the goodness of things you call
sacred.
Until I’m sure I’ll get that right, I’m leaving it to her.
No comments:
Post a Comment