My favorite book a few years ago was The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. I knew I was a little too old for it and it was chock-full of cheesiness and unrealistic literary verbage being spouted by sixteen-year-olds, but it’s one of those books that affected me. It offered me words and phrases that even now still allow me to express myself more completely and to be open to viewing life through new lenses.
The book taught me the word “hamartia,” which I love. It gave me a word to describe something that everyone has, not only characters in books. Everyone has an hamartia. Sometimes we act on them; sometimes we don’t. But they’re always fatal. Perhaps death is an hamartia; perhaps it’s life’s hamartia. (Or is life death’s hamartia? Chicken…egg…chickenegg?)
It offered me a new way of looking at the power of books, too. I’ve often read a work that has me feeling things, good or bad or awesome or ugly, and I think about how incredible it is that someone wrote these words that make me feel so strongly.And then I start feeling that I’d reeeeally like to keep this book all to myself. I feel possessive of something that, by its inherent nature, cannot actually and solely belong to me.
In The Fault in Our Stars, John Green wrote, “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
Sure, it’s a little dramatic, but it made me realize that if a book is so awesome and powerful, we should all be reading it! By no means do I wish for us all to think or believe the same things, but books are full of ideas that make the world go ’round. Exposure to new ideas allows us to grow. I can’t keep a book to myself if I want the world to know the ideas that I often find have changed my life and hopefully will change the lives of others, too. I’d hate it if people could keep books from me, keep the ideas they’re filled with from me.
And this particular book also gave me a phrase that’s so simple. Every time I realize how decent the world can be I think, “It’s a good life, Hazel Grace.”
This gives me words for a feeling that constitutes too many other feelings to name them all: lucky, vital, human, fulfilled, sustained.
It’s a phrase I don’t feel often; it’s something so beautiful and filled with wonder that its rarity makes it all the more special. It often finds me at the strangest of times. But when it comes around, I know, and every single time I think, “It’s a good life, Hazel Grace.”
And damnit, Hazel Grace, it is a good life.
“If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” – Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle Alex
life&company 