The Fault in Our Stars belongs to John Green. "There's a Certain Slant of Light" belongs to Emily Dickinson. 2001: A Space Odyssey belongs to Stanley Kubrick.
Winter's Afternoon
He wrote by the flickering glow of the dying lightbulb inside his gooseneck lamp. The rest of his cramped study - encircled with bookshelves and filing cabinets precariously covered in chicken scratch notes, dictionaries, thesauruses, and books of poetry - had descended into utter darkness.
But Peter had not noticed as the gray light of early winter dusk spilled through the window and had been steadily extinguished, lost among the perpetual scratch of his ball-point pen across the blue-lined paper in his notebook. The noise created a pleasing, lulling drone in the back of his head like the spinning of a needle across an LP record, or the rushing water out of the faucet as he brushed his teeth.
He liked writing the old-fashioned way, where editing still meant a red pen and words squeezed into the margins, and cutting and pasting still involved actual cutting and pasting with the scissors he kept in the upper right drawer of his desk or sometimes in the flowerpot that Brianna had decorated three years ago in kindergarten, filled with sharpies and pencils with broken points.
He'd been told many times that it was quicker to write while typing on the computer, easier to edit, word process, and look for synonyms on the great sticky, unnavigable web of information called the internet. But, disregarding what the proverbial "whoever they are" persisted on telling him, Peter stubbornly continued to write just as he had learned when he was a child, stacks of tattered spiral-bound notebooks sitting in the bottom of the closet as evidence, stuffed unceremoniously into the large cardboard box that had once contained a microwave. His fingers were gnarled and blistered and there was a hard, red bump on his left middle finger that continuously throbbed from holding his pen too tightly.
With his left hand still moving periodically down the page, curled at the corner, ink smudged from sweat, Peter moved his right hand to clamp tightly around the Dixie cup sitting between the lamp and the flowerpot. He brought the thin, wax-covered brim to his lips and the smell of gin tickled his nose before the stinging bitterness of the taste of gin burned his tongue.
The liquor hissed like acid against the walls of his esophagus, screaming all the way down in a way that he long ago should have become accustomed to: he drank it often enough. Or at least that had been what Lynn had yelled at him as she threw her underwear and toothbrush, books, and mother's Waterford crystal bowl into a suitcase, which was stuffed into the backseat of her Chrysler sedan next to Brianna buckled into her booster seat.
The words came easily tonight. He knew he was nearing the end of the story, everything he had worked for since he had first started – first started three years ago when the doctor had faced them with his lips in a grim line, with Brianna's hand in Peters and Lynn had still felt safe enough beneath the heavy weight of his arm slung around her shoulders. Everything was now coming to the point, words gushing from his subconscious in a jumble of homophone errors and letters with spidery black tails because he didn't lift his fist far enough off the page.
He was seized by a fever and the steady ticking of the clock, the fading light, the very breath in his lungs could not distract him now. The words slid steadily down the veins in his arms, spilling out of his fingers onto the page in black and white and blue. The words had always come easily, like breathing, like the beeping of a heart monitor and the long, Latin names of drugs that got tangle on the tongue.
He had picked up cancer jargon against his best efforts, even against Lynn's insistence that he hadn't been an attentive father. He couldn't help it, he never could, not even before, before the screaming, and the hair falling out in bunches, and the slammed doors and the gin in Dixie cups. Writing had always been a lonely business. It wove through his mind and soul, taking over the movement of his fingers, the undulation of his breath, the inclination of his mind until there wasn't room for anything else. There had never been room for anything else.
His head was full of hospital beds and honking horns of yellow cabs and too much tension in Lynn's face when she insisted that she was the only one who understood, it had only been natural that it had overflowed out of his hands onto paper like it had when he'd been a child and the sacred rearranging of words been his only shelter. It was only natural that it had erupted in a fiery outburst of stifled passions and screaming until his and her throat grew hoarse, culminating in the shuddering slam of the front door, the clatter of the wind chimes Brianna had made when she was six, and the neighbors from the apartment upstairs complaining later of all the noise.
They didn't complain anymore and hadn't for two years because there wasn't anything left to complain about. Writing and the guzzling of gin caused very little noise, and couldn't be heard over the thumping of garbage trucks outside, the patter of footsteps on the sidewalks, screeching wheels on pavement and heavy smog filtering the light of the sun hanging even higher in the sky then the tops of the skyscrapers.
Peter moved on to the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next line of dialog. It was all coming to a marvelous crescendo, Anna and all she represented would have her final line, her final breath, her final glorious epitaph that would somehow make it all worth it, somehow add the years and the meaning to his precious Bri's life, dripping away drop by drop, moment by moment like the liquid in the IV slipping into her arm.
Brianna, whose very existence caused pain, whose shining glory and sweet smile caused agony and oppression, like that certain slant of light on winter afternoons. Whose heartbeat ticked away the moments to the oblivion of not only herself but this paper-thin version of herself that Peter had constructed when Lynn had taken away the flesh, blood, and bones of her living counterpart.
The phone rang. Peter wrote, fingers tumbled over themselves in the haste to get it all down, to finish it all before the time was up, before the pulse stopped jumping in her throat and her eyes darkened until she could no longer read by any amount of light.
The phone rang again, tone piercing and sharp in the darkness and white sound of the scratching pen, heard for so long that it had grown as familiar as a mother's lullaby, a caress pressed to the crown of his head.
It rang again, and again, and Peter's pen moved across the page, blinding and deafening him to everything but the particular lilt of Anna's voice when she spoke brokenly to her mother, telling her that she was afraid to die, that she was afraid to leave, afraid to break surface into the unknown that for all Peter knew, for all Anna, and Bri, and Lynn and everyone else knew, might be nothing more than a shallow, desperate dream.
The phone rang again and to Peter is suddenly penetrated his brain like the tolling of a bell, the doleful cry of Death himself when time had finally run out.
His pen tripped, spilling a trail of ink that was black but might as well have been red because it looked, and smelled, and perhaps tasted so much like blood.
The answering machine came to life with a burst of static, a voice that was mechanical, robotic, a recording that somehow illustrated everything that it was to be human, all of them nothing but robots anyway, like Hal singing "Daisy" right before he died at the end of 2001.
"Peter, pick up the phone."
It was Lynn's voice, robotic like the mechanical, disembodied voice that had told her to leave a message. Behind her words, Peter thought he could hear the static sounds of a hospital, the rattling wheels of a gurney, the unending tone of a heart monitor that could no longer detect a beat.
"Pick up the phone, Peter," she swore, swore at him like she had when she'd left, spit landing on his cheek.
It suddenly occurred to Peter that it was dark in the office, pitch black, nothing but the ring of light spilling from the naked bulb in his lamp, whispering grayly away in a dim circle, dissolving into the heavy darkness of the rest of the room.
"Damn it. I know you're there. I know it. Don't do this to me, Peter. Don't –" Lynn was crying, harsh, guttural sobs crackling through the answering machine, hiding the sounds of the hospital behind her.
Peter listened to her cry, gasping breaths filling the shadowy, hollow void of his office, the apartment, the building, the whole city and the world. He felt sweat collect on his palms, felt it mix with the ink on his fingers and bleed onto the half-filled page, blurring the lines of writing into an indecipherable mess.
"She's dead, Peter."
Her voice wound through the air like putrid smoke, like the bitter, frigid fingers of a ghost, reaching for his throat.
"She's dead. My precious girl –" And the line clicked shut, obliterating Lynn's voice so completely it was as though it had never been there, except for the echo that rebounded off the walls of Peter's head, mercilessly killing the hopes that it had all been a dream, a hallucination, he had misheard –
She's dead. She's dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
His fingers covered in ink and paper cuts were trembling. He realized he was still holding the brim of his Dixie cup to his lips. The cruel sharpness of the gin tingled on his pale lips. His left hand had collapsed on the page, palm stained black with the running ink, middle finger wound around the tube of his pen.
It was dark, and silent, horribly silent, and the bulb in the lamp flickered weakly, dying slowly, just like everything in this world was doomed to someday die.
It occurred to him suddenly that he was alone. The living, warm flesh and pumping hearts, breathing characters that he had erected from the foundation of his words had suddenly withered, simply gone on the merest breath of wind, dissolved back into meaningless collections of letters and syllables, lifeless as if Peter had never before breathed through their noses to give them consciousness years before.
He couldn't remember what he had been writing. He peered through the smudged ink, recognizing individual words, but could not make any sense of their progression, for the life of him could not remember how it ended. He realized it was because there was no ending. There had never been an ending. There was no continuation of life, no more beating hearts because they had never been there in the first place.
There was no longer any ending, no more ending without –
There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 'tis like the distance
On the look of death.
Author's Note: My feelings toward The Fault in Our Stars are complicated. I've had a lot of personal experience with cancer so I hesitate to praise something that, in some ways, feels like a blatant capitalization on other people's completely un-fictional suffering. Such a romanticized story as The Fault in Our Stars is bound to prompt many ignorant, hormone-driven girls to be caught up in the thrilling story of the passion of Hazel and Augustus, and not their pain. This encourages such unfortunate statements as "I wish me and my boyfriend could get cancer so we could be as cute as Hazel and Augustus" to pop up around social media.
I don't blame John Green for all of this. Any story touching upon such a sensitive subject as cancer that combines the incomprehensible idea of the death of children and drunken taste of first love is bound to attract people who will not understand, or perhaps understand for all the wrong reasons – reasons I am sure John Green never intended his story to be understood for.
Like I said, my feelings about this book - particularly about the following it has so swiftly accumulated - are complicated. Another part of me feels like this is a very sweet, very sad, sometimes very realistic story (accept that I am sure it is uncommon for people with cancer to read books about cancer), and one that I was happy to read if not only for the literary angle, certainly having a much better vocabulary than most other young adult novels out there (first-person point-of-view aside).
John Green paints a heart-rending picture, using characters that have, against my greatest efforts, burrowed themselves into my heart – just like any good story will do. And I'll admit that The Fault in Our Stars is a pretty good story. I felt the pull of words while I was reading it and this idea came into my head, demanding to be written just as pain demands to be felt. I hope you enjoyed it.