This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the primal nature of fear and its fundamental role in human evolution and experience.
In this quote, John Green describes fear as the most basic and ancient emotion, one that predates humanity and the world itself. He emphasizes that this deep-seated fear has been essential for survival and evolution, motivating creatures to adapt and overcome, from ancient fish evolving lungs to the human instinct to mourn and bury the dead. By recognizing fear's profound influence on our ancestors, he highlights its significance in our lives today, suggesting that it is both a driving and a transformative force.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming fears in life choices.
Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?" "Sometimes people don't always understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said. Isaac shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?" I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.
Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.
I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.
I don't think pandemics make us afraid of death, I think they make us afraid of oblivion. They force us to grapple with the futility of effort. Also they make us barf which isn't fun either... Wash your hands, cover your coughs, and find a way to hold in balance the futility of effort with the necessity to struggle.
So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that's not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered. I have found this very useful to think about over the years, and I find that it is a lot easier and more bearable to be sad when you aren't constantly berating yourself for being sad.
We kiss. Her hands are freezing on my face, and she tastes like coffee and the smell of the onion is still stuck in my nose, and my lips are all dry from the endless winter. And it's awesome.
Nil desperandum, -- Never Despair. That is a motto for you and me. All are not dead; and where there is a spark of patriotic fire, we will rekindle it.
Some people are walking around with full use of their bodies and they're more paralyzed than I am.
Without courage, all other virtues are useless.
I'm not easily scared; from the age of 8, I learned what it means to have everything you know taken away and what it means to persevere. I approach politics the same way.
Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is".
Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.
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