John Green, Pasta, and Crumbling Pedestals

The problem with John Green is that, while I regard him as one of the greatest men of my time, he never fails in making my mind swim with philosophy and human nature and mirrors and windows and gigantic white cows.

So that means, to be blunt, that I end up writing another silly thing about love and humanity and so on and so forth.



One of things about most of John Green books is that there's almost always a guy who falls in love with a girl. Arguably, you could say that each and every one of these girls fit the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, but that's not necessarily true. In "Paper Towns", the guy falls in love with the manically-pixie type girl, but he essentially knows nothing about her. But he, as all we humans do, places her upon an impossible pedestal and imagines her as something more than human. He's obsessed with the mirrored idea of this girl who, in actuality, doesn't even exist.

And that makes me think and realize some things.

We like to imagine celebrities and popular people and the objects of our affections as beings untouched by fear or anxiety or nervousness. We objectify them as a sort of perfection. I do the same; I objectify romance as a sort of perfection that will result in my "salvation". While logically I don't believe or crave love, I actually do- I want love and happy endings and kissing and all that romantic bullshit. But that's just it; romance isn't perfect and it never will be and it will never be my salvation.

But then why am I, an inherently anti-social and introverted individual, so obsessed with the idea of love, a very social and personal ideal?

Because I objectify it. I like to think that love would transcend the reality of humans, and elevate the people romantically involved. I've seen it in books and movies- the lovers who become more. And I want that. Desperately.

But we're just imperfect beings who can never understand each other, and the pitiable idea of "love" will never change that. So while I may crush on people and sometimes think "why not give romance a chance?", I think I really know the reality of it, and that love is an unreachably perfect ideal that has not become flawed and corrupted, but has, in actuality, always been that way.

I'll stop pretending to be an intellectual now and just go resume eating lunch.