To be honest, when I first heard that Hank Green had published a
fiction book, I was skeptical. He’s a YouTuber and
podcaster, and he does a lot of great stuff, but I was concerned he’d just
gotten a book deal because he had an audience, and it was a safe bet that
people would buy the book. Which I did.
But it actually turned out to be quite good. I read the first book, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, last
year. I just recently reread it, and then went straight into the new book, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, which
came out this month.
Warning: minor spoilers
will follow.
Twenty-three-year-old April May is walking in New York in the middle
of the night, and she sees this huge Transformer-like sculpture. She gets her
friend to come see it, they make a YouTube video, and it goes viral. The statues
appeared out of nowhere in cities all over the world, and nobody knows what
they are or where it comes from. Is it aliens? It might be aliens.
Because they were some of the first to post a video, and because April
is a cute American girl, and because of luck, their video is the one that
really gets famous as the first discovery of the statue that April calls “Carl.”
She gets swept up in a maelstrom of fame and politics in the quickly polarizing
debate about whether Carls are a benevolent force that will bring humanity
together (her take) or whether they came to Earth to destroy us and should be
feared (the take of her enemy, Peter Petrawicki).
This isn’t a review so much as me thinking about
questions and themes that stuck out to me. Starting with…
How did our country
get to be so divided?
When I first read An Absolutely
Remarkable Thing, I found it to be a great framework for me to think about
the 2016 election a few years after the fact. For instance:
[B]y
engaging with him, I was affirming him and his wackos. Their ideas were getting
more exposure through my larger audience, and I… was confirming
the idea that there were two sides you could be on.
-An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
It wasn’t until after Mr. Orange actually won the 2016 election
that I realized how all of our criticism and ridicule actually gave him
attention, which turned into votes.
Also, this particular quote draws attention to the way that these
binary spectrums on political issues are constructed. We didn’t
have to live in a world where wearing a mask during a global pandemic is
controversial. It could just be something people do, like putting on a seatbelt in the car.
But we love to be angry, or at least websites want us to love to be angry, anything to keep us clicking through
their content. So the stories about people who want the “freedom”
to not wear a mask get amplified, and this becomes an increasingly polarized
issue. (Not that the president helped with that. But the reactions of people
who are pro-mask-wearing probably could have been improved.)
How should we
respond to extremist violence?
I won’t go into details, because it really is worth
reading for yourself, but there are moments in these books that address
fear-driven mass violence.
That was
always the way of these strongmen. They would craft the fear so carefully and
then toss it into the world for everyone to use. And when someone took that
fear and destroyed with it, they were just ‘unstable’ or ‘mentally
ill.’
-A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
Back to talking about the American president again. He does not have
to say “I support neo-Nazis” to support neo-Nazis and
strengthen their base. He can hint, and that is enough. And when something like
the shooting in Charleston shooting happens, he is responsible, if indirectly. And when he
says there are “very fine people on both sides” and acts of hate
continue to happen in our country, he is not innocent.
It’s
so tempting, even now, to try to blame all of the politicians and pundits who
were rising in power by feeding on other people’s fear and confusion.
We can
blame those people, but the only thing a mass murder ‘means’
is that we’ve made it too easy to kill.
-A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
The amount of shootings in this country is due to the amount of guns.
I am reminded of this tweet from 2015:
In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) June 19, 2015
Sure, we can hold people accountable for their actions. Certainly it's important to call a hate crime what it is. But ultimately, we are all responsible for mass shootings because we haven’t done enough to limit the number of guns. It’s a systemic problem. We should have fixed it by now, but we haven’t.
How can I stop
feeling like I need to be constantly productive?
I wouldn’t say this is one of the central themes of the
book, but it really resonated with me. I often feel guilty for doing things
that are relaxing instead of “productive,” whatever that means. I’ve gotten a
lot better at letting myself relax since college, when I was constantly studying. But there’s still that voice
in my head telling me I need to produce. It’s not always a bad thing. That
voice is what got me to write tonight, and writing feels good. But rereading
old favorite books also feels good, and I shouldn’t feel guilty for doing it.
Anyway, there were a couple of moments that I found helpful at the end
of the second book.
You will
always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy
can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor
should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.
-A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
I actually watched John Green’s video about this quote before I reached it in the book, but I think it would have stuck out to
me as regardless. My problem, ultimately, is that I am not good at treating my
own happiness as something worthwhile. That problem makes a lot of sense for
the world we live in. Capitalism doesn’t want me to be happy, because if I’m
happy I’m not going to be so inclined to buy things. Capitalism does want me to
be working all the time. Quotes like these are great for combating the
ever-present whisper of Mr. Monopoly/Uncle Sam.
Do people actually
believe _____?
“You really do believe that power must always go
to the people who deserve it, don’t you? … If you didn’t believe it, you’d have
to spend some fraction of your time not feeling like Jesus, and that wouldn’t
be any fun.
“But then someone else gets the power, and you
lose some of yours, and you don’t like that power has gone somewhere else. But
you also can’t stop believing that power organizes itself correctly because
your entire understanding of the world is based on that single idea. So,
instead, you convinced yourself that they’re cheating or corrupt or lying.”
-A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
This quote is not written
about a certain person currently occupying the oval office, but it could be. It
helps me understand a bit more about how Orange and his followers think. I
often wonder if they genuinely believe the lies they tell. I don’t
know the answer to that question, and it probably varies from person to person,
but this is part of an explanation.
And it is terrifying that he
is so intent on believing what he wants to believe. How do you argue with people
who will just believe whatever suits them best?
What is reality?
Sometime in elementary school, I read a book called Philosophy Rocks. It was a philosophy
book for kids, and it discussed what I later learned was Descartes’
idea about dreams. How do we know what’s real? Could I be dreaming right now? That book
led to what I think of as my first existential crisis. I was standing in the living
room, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had no way of really knowing if
anyone else is real. After all, I interact with people in my dreams, and
believe that they’re real while I’m dreaming. Or maybe it’s some elaborate
simulation. How can I ever know? What if I am completely alone in the universe?
I was ten or eleven at the time.
I won’t get into the context of how this question
comes up in Hank Green’s books because it’s fairly spoiler-heavy, and it’s
worth reading them without knowing exactly where they’re going. But here are a few quotes:
…the fact that everyone experienced it in
precisely the same way made it feel concrete. What is reality except for the
things that people universally experience the same way?
-An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
Every
night, you brush your teeth, you change out of your clothes, you lie down in
bed. And every morning, you wake up. There’s that period in
there, generally six to nine hours, in which you just aren’t anymore…. how does it not
terrify us that we spend a third of every day in a conscious unconsciousness,
living inside a virtual reality created by our own minds but that somehow we
don’t control? Like… what?!
-A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
I think about this a lot. Dreams are bizarre, and sleeping is bizarre.
The only reason I’m not constantly existentializing about this is that it
happens every night, so I’m used to the
idea.
And finally…
Here’s one last quote that I feel really gets to the
heart of the book.
The most impactful
thing you can do with power is almost always to give it away.
-A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
Thank you for reading! Let me know if you read this book—I’d
love to talk about it.
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