Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

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authors, books, fiction, inspiration, John Green, Life, Love, musings, philosophy, quotes, reviews, writers, writing

“Caring doesn’t sometimes lead to misery. It always does, ” which is why Will Grayson has two very simple rules to avoid crying: 1. Don’t care too much. 2. Shut up. He doesn’t see the point of crying, so he doesn’t like to get too emotional. Apparently, everything unfortunate that ever happened to him stemmed from his failure to follow one of the rules.

Will just tries to blend in, and is a loyal friend to Tiny Cooper, the most flamboyant gay ever, who “falls in love every hour on the hour with some poor new boy.” Tiny makes Will care, not just about him, but also about his autobiographical musical extravaganza called “Tiny Dancer,” he’s about to stage at school. Then there’s Jane, who he has inconvenient feelings for – the super-smart girl in the Gay-Straight Alliance who likes the band Neutral Milk Hotel as much as Will does. He could care about her if he wanted to, he could even fall in love with her. But he is terrified that she will find out the truth about him; that he is: “Not that smart. Not that hot. Not that nice. Not that funny. That’s me: I’m not that.”

Now meet the other will grayson, who hates everything and is an anti-capital letter user. He lives with his mother, he’s depressed, poor and friendless except for a goth girl called Maura who likes him despite his obvious dissing of her. We find that this Will is in love with a guy named Isaac whom he met online and chats with, everyday, but keeps him a solemn secret. He is open to emotion, especially rage and he makes sure everyone knows it: “I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.” His only consolation is his chatting with Isaac, the guy he’s never met face to face with. Finally, he makes plans to meet up with Isaac in Chicago, of all ironic places, a porn shop.

This is the same porn shop the other Will Grayson finds himself wandering around after his fake ID gets him thrown out of the club he tried to get into with Tiny and Jane. When paths of these two inevitably converge on that night, their worlds collide and intertwine, taking on new and unexpected dimensions, plummeting towards revelations of the heart, and the epic production of history’s most fabulous high school musical.

The first Will Grayson is John Green’s and the second Will Grayson is David Levithan’s. John Green wrote all the odd-numbered chapters while David Levithan wrote all the even-numbered chapters. Together they created something of a narrative-spectacle. Green and Levithan’s writing always seek out love as it should be and friendship as its meant to be. This is why I always connect with their novels. In a world where your nostalgic and true feelings are encouraged to be swept under the carpet, their writing has the power to release us from the suppression of emotions and thoughts. Feel those feelings you are feeling, whether it is pain or pleasure, they are meant to be felt.

Green and Levithan are perhaps the most inspirational authors of young adult literature, purely because they know exactly what to say about love and friendship in the way teenage minds can understand. Love isn’t about sex or beauty, and yes it’s OK to have platonic love. It is also about acceptance, acceptance of yourself, whether you are gay, fat or depressed.

“NO. No no no. I don’t want to screw you. I just love you. When did who you want to screw become the whole game? Since when is the person you want to screw the only person you get to love? It’s so stupid, Tiny! I mean, Jesus, who even gives a fuck about sex?! People act like it’s the most important thing humans do, but come on. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them? Those are important questions, I guess. But they’re not that important. You know what’s important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don’t even know why he needs you? Whose drunken nose would you pick?!”

“i have a friend request from some stranger on facebook and i delete it without looking at the profile because that doesn’t seem natural. ’cause friendship should not be as easy as that. it’s like people believe all you need to do is like the same bands in order to be soulmates. or books. omg… U like the outsiders 2… it’s like we’re the same person! no we’re not. it’s like we have the same english teacher. there’s a difference.”

Both Green and Levithan allow their characters to experience love as realistically as possible. The baffling affairs of the heart stay true to themselves. Hearts break, hearts resist love, hearts deny love while quietly surrendering to it, and hearts seek like-beating hearts out. What I love about their stories is, in them, you don’t find people bearing the titles ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ filling up empty spaces. They are keepers of another’s heart in the most profound way love can elucidate.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan is funny, poignant and self-assuring. The sheer exuberance of Tiny Cooper who is egoistical yet totally lovable, steals the show by bringing together the two narratives of the Will Graysons. He is the master at dealing with heartbreak because he has had so many, and he wins the hearts of many who read this book, probably because Tiny is written by both Green and Levithan. Like most of their books, it is a discovery of life and the acceptance of its grand meaning, and my recent second read of this book left me wanting more from these two fantastic writers.

My favourite quotes from Will Grayson, Will Grayson:

“Some people have lives; some people have music.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot. ”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“I feel like my life is so scattered right now. Like it’s all the small pieces of paper and someone’s turned on the fan. But, talking to you makes me feel like the fan’s been turned off for a little bit. Like things could actually make sense. You completely unscatter me, and I appreciate that so much.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“this is why we call people exes, I guess – because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. it’s too easy to see an X as a cross-out. it’s not, because there’s no way to cross out something like that. the X is a diagram of two paths.”
― David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“i think the idea of a ‘mental health day’ is something completely invented by people who have no clue what it’s like to have bad mental health. the idea that your mind can be aired out in twenty-four hours is kind of like saying heart disease can be cured if you eat the right breakfast cereal. mental health days only exist for people who have the luxury of saying ‘i don’t want to deal with things today’ and then can take the whole day off, while the rest of us are stuck fighting the fights we always fight, with no one really caring one way or another, unless we choose to bring a gun to school or ruin the morning announcements with a suicide.”
― David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“The pure and simple truth
Is rarely pure and never simple.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“that’s it – hundreds of texts and conversations, thousands upon thousands of words spoken and sent, all boiled down into a single line. is that what relationships become?”
― David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“he is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with.”
― David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“I get it now. I get it. The things you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain

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art, books, Life, Music, musings, nature, personal, philosophy, photography, quotes, writers, writing

Photo Credit – Rob Leslie, Splash Effect. Taken at the moment a rock was thrown into the water in the Pacific Ocean during a winter sunset in White Rock, British Columbia, Canada.

It was James Taylor who said: 

I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain
I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I’d see you again

He may not had ‘set fire to the rain’, but this song is on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. And whenever I hear these lyrics, it makes me feel like nothing in life can surprise me anymore. Change is inevitable as much as death, but I’ve seen changes happening at lightening speed. It made me mortally aware of how easily joy can turn to tears and peace can turn to turmoil. We all know this fact very well, but most of us are not prepared for those changes, which goes to show that accepting the inevitabilities of life doesn’t really make a huge difference.

John Green in ‘The Fault in Our Stars’, writes: “without pain, how could we know joy?’ This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”

No matter how well we try to justify pain, whether it is because things happen for a reason or because it is the transience of life; the desire for joy never eludes us. And the pain never passes us without messing us up.

Fragile Things – We Save Our Lives In Such Unlikely Ways

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books, fiction, grief, inspiration, Life, Love, opinion, quotes, reviews, writers, writing

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman is subtitled “Short Fictions and Wonders”, which sums up this compilation nicely. The title of this book reminds us of ourselves. Like Gaiman himself says, human beings are fragile and breakable. But stories in the book also point out that fragility does not detract from durability. We survive most of the things we expect to die of. Sometimes we expect to die of a broken heart, but even with a hurt so great, our hearts don’t stop beating. The fragile-looking translucent butterfly wings take the Monarch butterfly from Toronto, Ontario to the rain forests of Brazil. And dreams….even when they are broken they continue to live on in a secret place, somewhere within us, at times, unknown to us.

Survival is not only for the strong and the unbroken. The weak, meek, lost and fragile ones manage to find their way through the twists and turns of fate with equal dexterity. But we don’t see it happening as they do. It’s often years later when you look back; you see the wonders of survival. Like Gaiman says; “we save our lives in such unlikely ways.” This doesn’t mean that we become completely healed or our emotional turmoils are over. It means that despite it all we survive, our hearts don’t falter and our dreams are shut safely away. Being broken isn’t so bad as you think. Yes it hurts and sometimes pieces of us get lost on the way, but it reveals who we really are and what we are made of. The enduring qualities of fragility refine us and re-define us.

What I love about Gaiman is his understanding of human emotions and his non-judgmental attitude. He doesn’t pass a verdict on his characters as to who is wrong and who is right, or what is right and wrong. He observes both sides of the coin and sometimes what happens when the coin stands on its edge. He leaves the judging, perceiving and apprehending to his readers. In the book, Gaiman also reveals the strength of stories although seem fragile.

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.” 
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things

There are some stories which can be told in fewer words but more expressively than a full-length novel. The stories and poems you find in Fragile Things are best described that way. I never felt like I was reading a short story collection. The power of emotions, intensity of feelings, the varying characters and captivating narrations run through the entire book. Story after story it opens up more gateways into thinking, understanding and being fascinated. The idea for Fragile Things came to Gaiman in a dream: “I think…that I would rather recollect a life misspent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt” were the words turned up in his dream. Using “twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks” Gaiman has written “stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters” and they will certainly outlast him and his readers.

“Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things

Why Did I Dream of You Last Night? by Philip Larkin

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art, dreams, grief, Love, memory, musings, nature, photography, poetry, thoughts, writing

Photo Credit – Elmar Akhmetov, Kazakhstan, Winner, Low Light, Open Competition, 2013 Sony World Photography Awards

Why did I dream of you last night?
Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
beyond the window.

So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
- Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

-Philip Larkin

Some poems say it all and some pictures don’t need words at all…. But there are times, you have to say why. Philip Larkin is one of my all-time favourite poets. I always find meaning in his poems, some I even closely relate to. His poetry says it without embellishments and political correctness, and you catch a glimpse of his real self and life through them. “Why did I dream of you last night” is one of Larkin’s earliest works, and it’s been sometime since I have grown all too familiar with each and every word in this poem. Dreaming of someone you are not supposed to dream about  wounds your soul. It’s like, each time you dream…your soul gets a little bit torn. The aftermath is waking up with almost physical hurt somewhere inside of you that you can’t point out. There’s nothing you can do about how and when that hurt disappears. All you can do is wait… until it dies down on its own…

Dreaming is beyond our control. It is the danger zone where our worst nightmares can capture and bound us, and make us watch helplessly what we dread the most. I dream a lot and I didn’t mind it, because I would wake up and realise that nightmares were not real and sweet dreams were possible. But now, it’s different. Once your nightmares have come true in real life there’s nothing else to fall back on after you wake up. Everything you have been trying to forget plays in your head, awakened by fresh blows to the memory. And again, block by block I have to build up my stronghold to keep those memories and thoughts away. It’s a messy business and I’d rather I didn’t have to do it.

Unlike the handprints on sand that are easily erased forever, the memory of those handprints on that sand comes to stay with you forever. And you build these giant fortresses and sophisticated defense systems to keep the memory away, when all the while it was inside and never outside to keep away. This is why we have to be afraid of what’s within… Our own hearts can betray us and our own dreams can torment us.

The longing in these eyes

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Animals, culture, documentary, humanity, Life, musings, nature, philosophy, photography, quotes, soceity, writing

Photo Credit – The BBC

“Some will take refuge in the old cliches that humans are different from other animals. But when did a difference justify a moral prejudice? When did those with black hair have a right to mistreat those with red hair…or even those with blue or purple hair…Surely the crucial similarity that men share with other animals is the capacity to suffer? Regardless of the number of legs or the woolliness of our fur, we can all suffer… - Dr Richard Ryder

This is a Bengal tiger, who was once free as a cub. He was discovered in the luggage of an animal smuggler and since been living in a cage, in captivity, away from all those who love him and will love him. What made me write this post was a BBC feature story I came across about tigers in Thailand. No one seems to bother to plan a place for these rescue creatures to roam freely. Once these tigers are rescued from smugglers, they are held in captivity forever, in cages that barely have room for them to freely move about, play and frolic. These tigers go from being captured to being saved and back to captivity. There is so much more the relevant authorities can do to help these animals. Indifference towards their suffering, longing and misery is just as bad as cruelty to animals. 

I wonder why animals don’t have the same privileges as humans. Who said we are superior to them? Who drew out a plan of co-existence in which we treat them as we wish? According to Bertrand Russel, the very simple fact that we can destroy animals more easily than they can destroy us is the only solid basis of our claim to superiority. However much we try to dress it up, that is very much the truth. We can choose which animals we want to eat, which animals we want to have as pets, which animals we want to kill and hunt for sport, and which animals we will cage without any regard for their pain.

Animals feel pain just as much as we do. If you take away a child from a mother, it will break her heart. And in the same way, a mother of a tiger cub feels the same agony. The love and tenderness of the mother for the young are not produced by reasoning, but by feeling. This doesn’t change just because they are animals. When I was watching Dave Salmoni’s documentary Into the Pride, I saw a lioness calling out for her cubs anxiously and agitated when she couldn’t find them. She was in what Dave called a lion panic. The longer it took her to find her cubs the more torn up she was. Animals have emotions too…and sometimes they are stronger than our own.

Why do we call ourselves moral creatures? We are not even kind to the members of our own species. We treat each other in the worst possible way. We kill one another, steal from one another, abuse, mistreat, disregard, betray and hate each other. Humans are not capable of loving its own kind, and that puts us in a moral dilemma rather than a moral superiority. Mark Twain once wrote:

“Man is a religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the ‘True Religion’ – several of them! He is the only animal that loves his neighbour as himself but cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven. The animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste……Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures. The fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot. I am not interested to know whether it is profitable to the human race or not. The pain it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis and sufficient justification of my enmity towards it without looking further. In studying the traits and dispositions of the so-called lower animals, and contrasting them with man’s, I find the result humiliating to me.“

Animals do not exist for the benefit of mankind. They exist for their own reason. But we have atrociously twisted this fact to our own advantage. This very act makes us evil. We are a selfish species who play a foul game with foul rules. It is no surprise that we mistreat animals when we are capable of mistreating each other. There are so many instances when I think animals display worthier qualities than ours. In their book, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, they ask this rhetorical question:

“In actual laboratory experiments monkeys were forced to choose between electro-shocking other monkeys and doing without food themselves. Almost all of the monkeys went hungry for up to two weeks rather than shock others. These macaques, who have never gone to Sunday school, never heard of the Ten Commandments, never squirmed through a single junior high school civics lesson, seem courageous in their moral grounding and their resistance to evil. If the situation were reversed, and captive humans were offered the same deal by macaque scientists, would we do as well?”

I think we all know the answer to that.

Do The Stars Gaze Back At Us?

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inspiration, musings, nature, opinion, philosophy, photography, poems, poetry, stars, thoughts, writing

Photo credit – Jim Richardson

I stood beneath the mighty night sky

That had stars glimmering from up high

I wondered about what they had seen

For centuries and centuries of their being

Did they see broken hearts cry?

And young lovers say goodbye

Did they see the wars we fought?

And the retribution people sought

Did they see the innocent and kind?

And the blank gazing of the blind

Did we cause them great pain?

With our lasting human vain

♠

Gazing at our world for so long

They must have seen our every wrong

So what made their watching worthwhile?

What made them warm up and smile?

Was it the few kind hearts of mankind

And the gracious thoughts of human mind

Though not seen endlessly

Like the stars that shine relentlessly

These were the reasons the stars had

For not feeling eternally sad

©Lakshani Suranga 

There’s No Returning To Paradise

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Life, Love, musings, Neil Gaiman, personal, philosophy, quotes, Relationships, thoughts, writing

We fool ourselves into believing a lot of things. Not because they are true but because we want them to be true. And the worse part is although we keep saying life is unpredictable; we don’t know how unpredictable we are. One day you might wake up wanting to hold on to a person you wanted to let go of? It can happen, it has happened. I was never afraid to love, I just never thought I could love that much. But now, I fear love more than I fear death. We know death takes away. It doesn’t give and then take away. But love, it gives us so much, shows us what its capable of, and then takes it all away.

You never think while you are in love about the nightmares you would be waking up from in the future. You never really know what losing that love can do to you. Sometimes you wonder and imagine, but never accurately. Love is an absolute mind-fuck. It is the thing that can give us life and the thing that can take life away. If you know all this to be true, then you are a survivor of love. Gosh it sounds like a nasty disease isn’t it? But to be literally alive is different from feeling alive. This leaves you ever searching for an alternative remedy. Love is also the remedy for the malady. It is an antidote. Therefore there’s no other alternative that can equalize it.

Knowing what love can do to you closes all doors to blissful ignorance. Even if we live with it or without it, just one bite from that fruit is enough to keep us in exile. The thing about love is its own conflicts. It plays its own game of pain and pleasure and we are told to enter at our own risk. But we soon forget our warning, because love makes us forget everything unpleasant. Until such time it slips away from us.

Do I actually hate love? I don’t think any of us really do. But at times we feel like we do, and we feel like it deserves some amount of hatred from us. That certain type of love which needs another to give and receive, it is ghastly!

The Fault in Our Stars – The World is Not a Wish-Granting Factory

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authors, books, cancer, commentary, culture, fiction, inspiration, John Green, Life, loss, Love, quotes, reviews

I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Accepting life is just as important as accepting death. Sometimes, it’s even harder, despite the fact that we live life everyday and we die only once. I swore to myself that I will never read another young adults novel again, but my curiosity got the better of me. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green left my eyes welling up throughout the story. It shouldn’t surprise me or you, considering how emotional I can get about a book. But what intensified my emotions was the depth of the story. It’s not just about two young teenagers who are suffering from cancer falling in love with each other. It is about everything life puts you through when your stars are faulty.

The story is narrated by 16 year old Hazel Grace Lancaster who has terminal lung cancer. She has an oxygen tank attached to her via the tubes through her nose. At a Cancer Children Support Meeting, she meets Augustus Waters, a former basketball player who has lost a leg to osteosarcoma. They lend each other their favourite books. Augustus lends Hazel “The Price of Dawn,” a “brilliant and haunting novelization” of his favourite video game, and she lends hers: “An Imperial Affliction” by Peter Van Houten, about a girl who has cancer. Van Houten ends his novel abruptly in the middle of a sentence, and Hazel is obsessed with finding out what happened to the characters. Augustus too becomes fascinated with the novel just as much she is. He then uses his ‘wish’ from The Genie Foundation to send himself and Hazel to Amsterdam to meet Van Houten.

Augustus shows Hazel what it’s like to be unconditionally loved. He becomes her much needed strength and support. Gus encourages her to chase her dreams and not to give up on her hopes. The humour and companionship he brings to her is truly inspiring. The readers can almost feel his caring warmth. As the story continues we also see his vulnerable side. His strong and attractive exterior breaks down, showing the reader his flaws, fears and humiliations. This is what makes him more lovable. The gut-wrenching, heart-breaking humanness in his struggle to stay alive and feel alive is absolutely heart warming.

Through this story we are reminded that “the world is not a wish-granting factory.” Hazel’s narration brought me closer to her feelings and the suffering of her friends. The beauty of this story lies in its lesson about the reality of life. It is an exploration into our fragile human side, the one which manages to take us by surprise.

They say our destiny is written in the stars. And I believe that more strongly than before. Life doesn’t treat everybody the same way. And no matter how much you wish or hope, what’s meant to happen will always happen. The only thing we have control over is making our existence worthwhile. The love story of Hazel and Gus gives their lives a new meaning. Neither Hazel’s oxygen tank nor Gus’ prosthetic leg come in the way of their beautiful romance. Those things only make their love much more meaningful and moving. They see each other’s emotional and physical ordeals and accept each other no matter what. It is more romantic than a walk on a twilight beach or a white wedding. I didn’t just read about compassion, kindness, frailty, love and courage; I felt them through this story.

When unpleasant things happen to us, we fall from grace. But the most noble of ways to get through our hard times is to hold on to our greatest strengths. If you are capable of true love, kindness, empathy and hope; you need to carry them on. It may be other people we are helping while we are down ourselves, but life doesn’t have to be a game of profit. The Fault in Our Stars is a realistic depiction of the nature of genuine love, pain of loss and brutality of sickness. It isn’t a depressing novel, neither is it a joyful one; but it is a moving and insightful story which helps us understand life and how we should come to terms with it in a positive manner. And it is bound to shake your emotions free.

My favourite quotes from The Fault in Our Stars:

“That’s the thing about pain…it demands to be felt.” 
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Without pain, how could we know joy?’ This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.” 
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.” 
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you. All efforts to save me from you will fail.” 
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.” 
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” 
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“But I believe in true love, you know? I don’t believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.” 
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Some people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.

“Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.” 
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars” 
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Neil Gaiman’s and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens – What it means to be human

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authors, books, culture, fantasy fiction, fiction, inspiration, Life, musings, opinion, people, philosophy, reviews, writing

Is there such a thing as being essentially good or essentially evil? Is this how we define angels and demons? If so, what really happens if good and evil play together? Is humanity the product of such a combination? The story above comes from a masterpiece of two of the most brilliant minds of fantasy fiction, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. The book is called Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter.

In the story, the Antichrist is born and is being raised in the wrong family, while an angel named Aziraphale and a demon named Crowley are having second thoughts about the Armageddon. They have grown to like living on Earth and are rather attached to it. According to ‘The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch’ (the world’s only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world is about to end on Saturday, before dinner. But Crowley and Aziraphale really don’t want it to end, and hope the Antichrist might just decide not to carry through with it.

Due to a mistake by the nuns who switched him at birth, the antichrist, Adam Young grows up without any diabolical guidance. He is a normal eleven year old who has a normal family and normal friends. He has no idea of his real powers but he uses them naively to do thoughtful gestures.

The central idea of the story is quite a remarkable one. It explores the notion of what it means to be good, evil and most of all human. Human beings are not perfect; we screwed that up long time ago by being simply human. You know…making mistakes by giving into temptation and getting all curious. Anything with a notice saying “do not eat” is bound to put things in motion. Crowley regards, being human as a creative act. Although flawed, humans fascinate him and he looks at them with a kind of affection. While the book has a cynical tone, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman try to create a more optimistic picture of mankind.

Mankind is better understood by seeing that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of human history are not caused by people being essentially good or essentially evil, but by people being essentially people. Human affairs are characterised by both good and bad qualities.

The immortals in the book are humanised by living thousands of years among people, and they go against their nature to help mankind. While Aziraphale has a natural tendency to do good things and Crowley is designed to be evil, they both fall in trouble by involving themselves in human affairs.

Sometimes, the idea of good and bad is rooted in the type of person rather than the act itself. We expect ‘good’ people to do good things and the ‘evil’ to do evil things. But what we should really expect is people to do people things, and occasionally for angels and demons to act human-like.

I know being human isn’t much. Only demons like Crowley and angels like Aziraphale are impressed. But that is who we are. If we ask ourselves what it means to be human, the answer lies in our strengths and weaknesses. We can be strong but at the same time we are weak too. Our imperfections create chaos; then again our attempts at perfection help solve those chaotic problems. We have prejudice, ignorance, faith and free will, and our uniqueness is essentially human.

We also notice in the story that the human mind is not capable of seeing War, Famine, Pollution and Death when it doesn’t want to see them. We are so good at looking past them, even if they happen to be right in front of us.

In the pseudo-Biblical story at the beginning of this post, Aziraphale is the angel that was guarding the Eastern Gate of Eden. He had a flaming sword to help him with his job and he gives it to Adam and Eve to keep them warm in a storm, after they were cast out of Eden. He thought it was dreadful to leave them alone in the cold when Eve was expecting. He then tells everyone he lost the sword. Lying is known to be fundamentally bad, but if you lie for a good cause will you still be guilty? Absolute evil and absolute good cannot be always absolute. Somewhere, somehow they converge at a point to create something almost human-like.

This book makes some remarkable observations of human life that are cohesive and accurate, and in no way it denies the existence of God. What it signifies is our inability to understand the ineffability of God and the cosmos. This makes us who we are. Whether divine intervention and miracles are plausible or not, the choice of how we live our lives is left to us. And as mankind, all we can do is our best.

Sands of Time

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art, grief, Life, loss, memories, musings, nostalgia, photography, quotes, thoughts, time, writing

“No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.”

It was once written on the sand, a name I used to call out often. Looking at that now, I feel like it must have been so long ago, in a different universe. It couldn’t have been in this world. It couldn’t have been from the days of our calendar. When I close my eyes I remember the feeling of being in that place, at a time very distant from the present. But it’s not a feeling that lasts long. I come back to the present so quickly, the flashback doesn’t last even two seconds. Yet, within that second, I experience something I must have known well, because it feels like home, for just a second.

There are days I look up at the night sky and wonder: where could be this universe? Is it still there? If so, how am I doing now? But something tells me that, that universe ended. It must have exploded into billion little pieces along with the people, their stories and the warmth which gave them life; I tell myself. When a story ends, we like to begin another. But we never ask, ‘how are the people in the first story doing now?’ If it’s a tragedy we cry and say ‘that was heartbreakingly beautiful.’ But there’s no beauty in a tragedy no matter how well it’s written. Tragedies are irreversible incidents. With them, there’s no going back to how things were.

The sands of time continue to fall through. It doesn’t stop, slow down or change its course. It treats everyone equally. The sun comes up and goes down, as it is supposed to. Your tears and laughter make no difference. We can’t expect the world to be engulfed by a gloomy darkness, just because our hearts ache or lives end.