Last few weeks have been quite enlightening… as the ultimate truth “solitude is bliss” steadily dawned on me. This realization leaves one feeling lonely and empty initially, but eventually turns out to be that truest companion whom you trust more than yourself. The innate quietness of solitude calms the mind lost in a maze of indecipherable thoughts and imaginations constantly trying to control our actions. You get to understand the beauty of nature only once accompanied by solitude and bereft of desires that tend to pull us toward the cacophony of living. After being indoors for long due to pandemic, I finally decided to take a walk to a nearby local bookstore and just purchase whichever books strikes as different, even if a bit. I selected John Green’s Paper Towns and expected nothing much, except an entertaining teenage story. Yes, it is an amusing adolescent “coming of age” story. However, never judge a book by its cover, as it turned out to be a much more serious stuff, though not every time.
The protagonist Margo Roth Spiegelman impacts the readers in a massive way, especially those who have always longed for solitude and have made all efforts to escape from the traps of a defined way of living. A defined way of living is kind of lifestyle wherein procrastination is discouraged and success means fulfilling others’ dreams and not those make us different. It also means proving success by ending up like every other old grumpy person around us, i.e., bored, frustrated, irritated, constantly feeling like a loser, waiting for death and so on. It also means becoming as irrational and mundane as everyone around us; you become so mundane that you mix up with the crowd by becoming one. But here comes Margo, like our favorite characters of any fiction, who is just too bored of family and friends too mundane to discover adventure. Their superficial life and fascinations simply bore Margo and push her to the extreme side of living. What started as a mere vindication spree against cheating friends and boyfriend soon transformed into a real search for her truer side through anonymity, invisibility and mystery. If you enjoy anonymity and hate glaring at the simpering profiles of people on the so easy to reach social media sites, this book might touch the chord of your heart.
It’s just Margo and her mysterious hiding , or better to say hangout, places that made this novel a good read for me. I simply enjoyed the way she hid the true side of her personality from everyone; in fact, it fascinated me. The rich, yet not contemporary, music taste of Margo leaves the feeling of nostalgia and the innate desire to search the meaning of life and surrounding through art. One can also relate with the inner turmoil of Margo that she was in turn able to decipher through the classic poem “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman. Finding one’s truer self and ultimate destination through a poem that encourages and inspires everyone to discover themselves and explore the unexplored makes total sense to people like me who continuously shape their thoughts through the chisel of thought-provoking literature. Every piece of literature enlightens readers by hiding meanings in between words beautifully adorned like a pattern embedded or woven in a carpet. The novel “Paper Towns” celebrates the concept of “solitude”, “discovering oneself”, and “taking the oft less taken roads”. These are not mere fancy words but true yearnings of the current noisy times when it’s difficult to lead a nomadic and anonymous life.
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