Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Mattering and Changes

In John Green’s book An Abundance of Katherines, he talks of mattering and changes.

“…that what matters to you defines your mattering….

… the past is a logical story…it’s the sense of what happened…but since it is not yet remembered, the future need not make any sense at all…

“In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of that century, might be forgotten.  The future will erase everything---there’s no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion.  The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.       But there’s another way.  There are stories.” ….."and he found himself thinking that maybe stories don’t just make us matter to each other—maybe they’re also the only way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long.”…’even if it’s a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me.  An infinitesimal change.  And that infinitesimal change ripples outward—ever smaller but everlasting.  I will get forgotten, but the stories will last.  And so we all matter---maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.”

“….And it wasn’t only the remembered stories that mattered…” “….but that there’s a place in the brain for knowing what cannot be remembered.”

 

Here’s to books that change us.  That change who we are.  That change how we look at things.  That might even change how we write as writers.

The main character in John Green’s novel looking for Alaska talks about looking for his great Perhaps.

As writers that are looking to be published perhaps that applies to us as well. 

Are we all looking for that ‘great Perhaps?’

May we as writers always write the stories that change others, that change us, in some way.

So what stories have changed you lately?


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