I Go to Seek a Great Perhaps

五年前，高中生的我在数学课上埋头读这本书，哭到不能自已。

今天，在异国他乡的我坐在书桌前看到最后一集那幕For Alaska Young的时候，再一次哭到不能自己。

我理解很多人说的绿叔叔的书“空洞得令人难以置信”，“quirky白主角傻白甜恋爱”。但是怎么说呢，生活不是一直高深的，偶尔能借这种小清新鸡汤文艺片能带领你宣泄一下被现实生活压迫的眼泪，心情还是很舒畅的。而且我感觉看片就像time/space travel，借着别人的视角感受他们的生活，体会一番酸甜苦辣，剧终后再从中完美脱身，感慨自己现实生活的美好，不也算是一种庆幸舒畅嘛。更况且这片有跌宕的情节（虽然稍稍狗血）有搞笑的场景，有每个人独特个性的展现，精致的镜头等等，所以绝对不能说是烂片。

我一开始觉得没啥好看，觉得演员不够好看，甚至还觉得有些小小失望。转折的契机是考完试无聊准备开始快进看，然后开始看到他们的各种prank就觉得wow真的拍出来了！读书的时候只能自己脑海里想象，很多放鞭炮奔跑eagle的doomed look都需要自己不断的去想象，但是现在全都展现在眼前，和记忆里的场景重合错开再重合，觉得真的好感慨好不可思议。于是就开始继续好好看下去了。

跟原著很像，很像很像。所以我好喜欢，有种重回很久很久以前记忆的感觉。不过场景拍摄真的超棒超美（可以看下绿叔叔channel里随便拍的culver creek就感觉就很乡村小学）；然后选角虽然看上去都是一般长相，但是看久了就觉得很青春很美很pure；soundtrack也超赞，和各种阳光慢镜头非常搭。

最后附上pudge的essay：

“Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied only by the last words of the already-dead, so I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life. And then I screwed up and The Colonel screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And there’s no sugar-coating it: she deserved better friends.

When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where it led her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it in spite of having lost her.

Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And here’s how I know:

I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something’s meal. What was her - green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs - would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that sometimes, think that maybe “the afterlife” is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled.

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska’s genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.

Although no one will ever accuse me of being of a science student, one thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself - those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible,” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison’s last words were, “It’s very beautiful over there.” I don’t know where there is, but I know it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.”

- Miles ‘Pudge’ Halter