This post contains some quoted profanity, although not in any obscene or inappropriate context.
The past year has been insane. Ever since the World Health Organization first declared a global health emergency in the last days of January, the COVID-19 pandemic has touched every corner of the earth and affected virtually every aspect of our lives. It’s dominated the news for months, and has birthed disruptions and conversations that have been seen, felt and heard by people in countries north and south, east and west, rich and poor, free and unfree, at peace and at war.
Responses to it have varied around the world, and some countries - like the United States - have been violently polarized by the question of what the appropriate reaction is to this massive, unforeseeable, world-changing moment in history. Communities at the local, regional, national and international levels have tried to work together to respond effectively to the demands of this new global experience. Some have succeeded, and many have failed.
In the face of this terror, confusion, suffering and loss, all of us have sought ways both to understand and to escape the new reality that has taken over our lives. For me, reading is a means to accomplish both of these ends; I read articles, essays and studies to try to better understand the nature of the new challenges we face, and I read books to escape to different worlds and different thoughts.
One of my latest opportunities for escape came with the recent release of Hank Green’s A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, sequel to his debut novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. Having been a fan of Green for years, I read An Absolutely Remarkable Thing when it first came out, but in light of the second book’s publication I decided I would re-read it to get myself back into its world before diving into the sequel.
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing was published in September of 2018, back in a world where most people had never heard of terms like “social distancing,” “super-spreaders,” and “flattening the curve.” Accordingly, I expected it to be a refreshing escape from a world where every other sentence in the media I consume is in some way related to this unprecedented global crisis and our response to it.
Imagine my surprise, then, to read in the book a paragraph like this:
"This is the first time a truly international issue had hit our newly borderless world this hard, and no one knew how that might play out. The conversation was international - we all knew that… For the first time ever, humanity was literally sharing a dream."
Or this:
“[They] had sent us our instructions, but we were too damned stupid to allow ourselves to comply. Maybe in a few years, after treaties were signed, everyone would get on board and try it out, but probably not. Probably [they] would just sit there forever, waiting for the Earth to get its shit together enough to do this one stupid, simple little thing.”
Or this:
“If you pay attention, there is only one story that makes sense, and that is the one in which humanity works together more and more since we took over this planet. Yeah, we fuck it up all the time, yeah, there have been some massive steps backward, but look at us! We are one species now more than we have ever been. People fight against that, and they probably always will, but could there be any time in history when what [they are] asking us would be more possible? Asking dozens of governments to take the same action simultaneously with an uncertain outcome? Or at least asking them to allow their citizens to take that action?”
All of these lines are from a book that was not written about - could not possibly have been written about - this pandemic, or any pandemic (the last one being the 1918 influenza pandemic, in a world nowhere close to the globalization we have today). And yet, somehow, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing has provided me one of the most compelling and insightful lenses through which to examine the COVID-19 pandemic and our world’s response to it that I’ve encountered since it began.
That’s because the themes An Absolutely Remarkable Thing explores are ones that are deeply embedded in the nature of modern humanity, but that only come to our attention when immense changes or momentous events cast them into sharp relief. By making such a circumstance the inciting incident of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing’s plot, Green turned the book into a catalyst that allows us to examine those ideas at any time, without needing any point of reference except the imaginary event around which the book is based.
What Green couldn’t have imagined, however, would be that exactly such a monumental, earth-shattering event would be handed to us in the real world two years after the book’s publication. Because the COVID-19 pandemic is precisely the kind of disruptive, illuminating phenomenon that Green creates an imaginary instance of in his book to investigate ideas normally hidden to us, that investigation has turned An Absolutely Remarkable Thing into an extraordinarily relevant, uncannily penetrative story for our present times.
[I won’t go into details about the plot to avoid spoilers, so some of the language that follows will necessarily be vague.]
It’s a story about a completely unexpected, in many ways unexplainable global event that changes the history of the human species. It’s a story about how we react to the new and unknown, to things that we’ve never seen before and that challenge us to ask questions we’ve never asked before and try things we’ve never tried before. It’s a story about hope versus fear in the face of uncertainty, and solidarity versus selfishness in the face of opportunity.
It’s a story about how we talk to each other and think about each other when we disagree, and how we deal with complex situations and even more complex people. It’s a story about how we can be really bad at that, and how the systems we’ve built make it really easy to be bad at that, but also about how we can get better. It’s a story about how, in our ability to be so intensely different yet so intimately united, we are beautiful.
And, ultimately, it’s a story that leaves me hopeful about humanity.
“I’m stuck in a burning building. But more than that, I’m stuck on this planet with you. And honestly, I’m glad. I’ve been exposed to a lot of awful people in the last few months, but I’ve met so many more that are amazing, thoughtful, generous, and kind. I honestly believe that is the human condition.”
Those are the big, large-scale things An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is about, which in their astonishing relevance to this moment in time were what struck me most forcefully this re-read around. But An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a complex book, reflective of the complex world it’s in, and it’s about many other things as well.
It’s not just about the big picture, but also about the smallest of moments. It’s not just about the collective, but also the individual. It’s not just about a fantastical future, but also about many very real, very specific things about what it’s like to be a modern human.
It’s about how, in letting us pretend to be something we aren’t, the social internet often makes us into something we aren’t. It’s about the queer thing that is fame, and what it does to us when we have it and what we do to ourselves when we chase it. It’s about how we treat ourselves when we don’t like ourselves, and how we treat others when they try to help us.
Each of these is one of the many ideas Green has to share about the world we live in, and from them I came away with an enormously expanded and more nuanced understanding of human relationships, fame and the Internet, among other things. Having followed, admired and respected Green’s work as an Internet creator on his YouTube channels, podcasts and social media for years, I was fascinated by this deep dive into his perspective.
April May, the fearless protagonist of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, says this about art:
"Much of the best art is about balancing between reflecting culture while simultaneously being removed from it and commenting on it. In the best case, maybe an artist gets to say something about culture that hasn't been said and needs to be said."
I think An Absolutely Remarkable Thing achieves this beyond question (is it a coincidence that its initials are AART?). Its characters are a cast of twenty-somethings whose lives, experiences and identities are diverse and richly representative of the lives real people live today. Its setting is essentially a slightly modified version of the real world, and it retains all the fundamental attributes of our digital, globalized planet. By leaning into this realism, Green not only paints a beautiful picture of modern life but also highlights and comments on some of the strangest and most important parts of that picture.
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is hilarious, heartbreaking, and enlightening. And the more I think about it, the more I think “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing” is not a title, but a label.
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