The Fault in Our Stars

hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you
sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to
cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, “The
fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when
you’re a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be
found amid our stars.
While we’re on the topic of old Will’s insufficiencies, your writing about young
Hazel reminds me of the Bard’s Fifty-fifth sonnet, which of course begins, “Not
marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; /
But you shall shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone, besmear’d
with sluttish time.” (Off topic, but: What a slut time is. She screws everybody.) It’s a
fine poem but a deceitful one: We do indeed remember Shakespeare’s powerful
rhyme, but what do we remember about the person it commemorates? Nothing.
We’re pretty sure he was male; everything else is guesswork. Shakespeare told us
precious little of the man whom he entombed in his linguistic sarcophagus. (Witness
also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak
of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about
them. Language buries, but does not resurrect. (Full disclosure: I am not the first to
make this observation. cf, the MacLeish poem “Not Marble, Nor the Gilded
Monuments,” which contains the heroic line “I shall say you will die and none will
remember you.”)
I digress, but here’s the rub: The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye
of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint.
Your Hazel is alive, Waters, and you mustn’t impose your will upon another’s
decision, particularly a decision arrived at thoughtfully. She wishes to spare you pain,
and you should let her. You may not find young Hazel’s logic persuasive, but I have
trod through this vale of tears longer than you, and from where I’m sitting, she’s not
the lunatic.
Yours truly,
Peter Van Houten
It was really written by him. I licked my finger and dabbed the paper and the ink bled a
little, so I knew it was really real.
“Mom,” I said. I did not say it loudly, but I didn’t have to. She was always waiting.
She peeked her head around the door.
“You okay, sweetie?”
“Can we call Dr. Maria and ask if international travel would kill me?”

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