On "Looking for Alaska"

Looking for Alaska by John Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alaska asks, how will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? I like the Colonel's answer best: We don't. We take the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but we'll take it. Not to create a home at the back of it, but to indulge in it.

Alaska had an answer herself: straight and fast. Yet, she never considered - not to be alone, but with the people we care about, even the one that have passed on and whom we occasionally forget. In that retrospect, we find what's at the other end of the labyrinth, the unknown that awaits us through the end of our lives.

After all this, we might not even be anywhere. Or, I don't know - we could even be anywhere. We are never sure, only that we'd like to believe in all these things because we want to have something to hold on to. People will forget us soon enough. But we will forgive them because we are here now and our memories about this life will serve us right.

I like how Pudge brought up the thing about energies. How we are a greater part of the sum of our known parts. How that bigger part is invincible, never created nor destroyed. It just transfers from one place to another, manifesting into different forms. We are all energies. We are something that the religious doctrines would never resort to. We will be recycled, transformed. But we will live on because like tables, this world will always have another side. We don't know where exactly or how particularly, but we know about it. All that's left to do, like Pudge, is to hope that it will be very beautiful out there.

So when the labyrinth of suffering ceases to exist for us, or when we finish the maze, we will be prepared. We will be forgotten but we will forgive. And we will be big. And we will never be afraid of how we screwed up, or how bad it will get - because everything has to be that way after all. It will blow, this labyrinth. But, at least we will walk into it hand-in-hand and never by ourselves. We will never leave grief or guilt on the people we know and love. That's how we end the Great Perhaps. Otherwise, it wouldn't work. Like how the greatest prank in the world wouldn't work without allies - the very ones who have the blueprint and calculations memorized, breathing your exhalations, being one with your body.

Maybe, after then, there will be so much more to look forward to. Maybe an even Greater Perhaps, with ourselves in the form of our energies, taking infinity to discover it. That's a most beautiful thing that I'd like to hold on to.