Friday, 9 May 2014

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Finished The Fault in Our Stars last night. I am rushing out in a bit and I am desperately trying to replicate my thoughts last night before they get buried in the crush of matters floating around in my head, so pardon all the missing words, if any. In any case, my proofreading sucks, I am not meticulous, and I am essentially bad at anything that requires grammatical correction. 

I love Hazel's eulogy to Augustus Waters. It goes like this:

"My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because like all real love stories, it will die with us. As it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me, because there is no one I'd rather have. I can't talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this. There is an infinite between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many days of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You have me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful."-

Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. I have never ever thought about life like that. I used to believe that infinity was forever. That it was unknown but it was fixed; that all infinities were similar. However, it is so true that some infinities are bigger than others. Sure, science tells you that there are 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in one minute. But seconds could be further broken down into milliseconds and so on. We don't know what we don't know. We believe that time is fixed. That an hour is an hour, it is not infinity, and just the idea that there could exist a smaller infinity between two fixed numbers probably sounds ludicrous to many. But if we accept that there could be a variation of infinities, that infinity is not fixed, we could see how some infinities are bigger than others. 

You could have a forever within numbered days, but we are so wrapped up in seeking the everlasting forever, the infinity that is larger because we are greedy people, that we lose sight of the smaller infinity that flows between days. 

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