The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

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

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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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