Paper Towns with Paper Wings
(Slight spoilers, but nothing really giving away the actual plot lines here.)
Confined boredom coupled with an intense aversion to anything productive, led me to complete reading another book: “Paper Towns” by John Green. I find it extremely satiating how young adult and other seemingly harmless genres can evoke such powerful, emotional waves in me. Maybe the author didn’t precisely intend to, but beneath these lines, I found a bunch of deep, intellectual ideas to ponder on.
The novel raised a fundamental question for me as it ceased and left it unanswered while I flipped through the last pages, waiting for the closing, the closure. Here I refer to the difference in between the two protagonists’ lifestyles: one disconnected from society, residing in fictitious towns with books and literature as one’s sole solace. And the other: a perfectly designated life of all worldly desires and necessities, embellished with wonderful people to spend it with. Two opposite alternates, but none of them placed on a pedestal higher than the other. Maybe that's the point, that there is no sense of superiority here. Which is the better one? There is no apt response. And if there is one, you ought to explore it for yourself.
“I find a bit of Margo inside me”, the feeling slowly creeps up from the back of my head initially, but miraculously captures the entire foreplay as the story progresses. The way she is eager to jump from one lifestyle to another, but then she just wants to stay. The way she is a different ‘Margo’ to different people. The way her most veracious fragments lay in music and literature, two aspects of her that are known only to her, safely locked away in places no one ever peeks in. The way most strings inside her are detached, disconnected from the world, and so is she. The way she is an idea to most, this unapproachable distant persona that everyone sees, but no one ever really sees. The way she finds herself in the center even though she likes to lurk near the sidelines. The way she likes to escape without a final closure. Because well, the best way to say goodbye is to not say it at all, isn’t it?
The book is wonderful, because it is real and raw. It’s not a fun warm-blooded youth pomp and show for the entirety of it. At points, it is annoying and draggy, but those parts are important. We must go through them, and I did. At points, it is stupid, and redundant, but those parts are important as well. For top notch content requires top notch patience.
“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman provides a wonderful overtone for the story to be partially based on. If we’re all just originating from grass deeply interlinked by roots, why do we all sprout so differently? The common dirt we’re bequeathed to, constantly reminds us of our humble beginnings.
All these paper towns are flimsy. Pretentious. Weightless. Empty. You fill them with characters, stories, illustrations that you want to fill yourself with. But at the end, the only misery to discover is that it's just been you all along. The dreams float away with the air. The hallucinations sink to the bottom. It's just a paper girl, in a paper town, with her paper fate in her paper hands. Looking for a paperweight that will hold her tight, that will make her stay.
Do you surround yourself in this extravagant vanity, only to contain your insanity, or to suppress it? What if your disguise becomes you, in the end? What if it engulfs all the little fragments that made you, leaving behind shimmery pieces of glittered nihility?
I guess some of us just die fighting, while others fight dying. Which one are you?
