The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
In the past month I’ve got to know a new friend (who I’m very jealous of as she has a much more eloquent, thoughtful and regularly-updated blog than mine) because I’ve discovered someone who agrees with my views on the foolishness of many emotions, particularly the way in which so much of society is these days putting emotional ‘wellbeing’ far too high on their list of priorities. Her and I proposed and won ‘[t]his house believes that society should get over its collective emotional hang up’ a few weeks ago and while our views are probably stronger than this they are also in so many ways hypocritical so this thrust was the safest argument to have a shot at. My friend has from time to time in our (hopefully) philosophical conversations referred to a favourite book of hers, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and so last week I asked to borrow it and see if it is as good as she made out. And it had an immense effect on me as it seems to have had on her (facebook gives me the impression this happens, or you find it dull – one or the other). So last Friday evening I rediscovered ‘binge reading’; I haven’t been unable to put a book down in that way for quite some time. The book is very well-written and has a poignant and involving story, so I could enjoy it for that alone but in addition there were some particular parts and lines that made some big and very fundamental philosophical arguments. Unlike most books I read I finished it satisfactorily and didn’t want it to go on. It wasn’t a perfectly happy ending, but it was a complete ending. I would definitely recommend it as something everyone should read.
One of the big points raised was whether what one has in life is enough, whether it is okay to just be content with what you have. I’m not talking materially here. At one point in the book, which is written as a series of letters from the main character Charlie to an anonymous friend, Charlie considers a conversation he has had with a group of friends in a cafe-type place. The discussion is on celebrity culture as I recall and so it’s not something trivial; the group are being political about it. And he sits back and notes how the very same conversation has been had, with variations, by so many groups of friends in so many meeting places through time and space. Charlie says that this doesn’t matter, that this is okay, and it makes him feel comfortable to be repeating this situation with those he loves. I struggle somewhat to accept this. Is it meaningful to do something if it has been done before? It seems to me that something becomes less and less meaningful the more times it happens. Lately (since before I read the book) I have been observing people in a similar way to Charlie and questioning whether their lives have any worth as they bring up children and laugh and eat ice cream or whatever. Why do it? The premise here that allows it all to work is if we accept happiness and human contentment to be something to be maximised. But I take issue with this. Surely we are something more than that?
In keeping with this I have for some years held the view that learning and understanding should be the human race’s goal in order to work out without simply accepting if this idea of creating happiness is what we should do and aim for. Of late I have become particularly concerned with philosophy as something that has far less assumptions, and challenges those, compared with other disciplines – this concern and focus is likely to change with time, as always. But unfortunately I can’t contribute to this as well as I would like to. I’m afraid of what will happen when I finish education in the sense of getting to the end of university. What will I do? I can’t imagine stopping and going into a ‘career’. This of course may well change but all I seem to want to do at the moment is learn and understand. My friend thinks that you don’t need to look at the bigger picture and just need to concentrate on the step of the staircase you are on – but what if you are on the wrong staircase and don’t notice?
As you can probably see from these ramblings, I’m not entirely conclusive on this argument and of course that is hardly surprising given that I am contemplating the unanswerable question of the meaning of life. I intend to read the book again in a few months so I will maybe have another go then: the question that remains is whether it matters that everything one has done will have been done before. The idea is of a sense of mediocrity, of living a life that has been lived a thousand times before. I don’t think I could ever be happy (ha, see?) with doing that though I suspect that I will just fit another of these stereotypes, despite trying to fool myself for most of my life into thinking that I’m being original.
Another concept that was brought up in the book was an idea of a feeling of being infinite. In the book there are moments when Charlie and his friends are doing something together and he merely describes it as being infinite in the moment; he doesn’t illustrate any more than this. I suspect that we have all had this at some point. My friend says that this is one of her goals in life, to experience this infinity rather than happiness, and one of the reasons I wanted to read the book was to try and understand why she craves this ‘walking bare foot on cold tiles’ feeling. She says that it is about feeling insignificant and human and ordinary – but feeling that this doesn’t matter. But I would argue that this infinity, while nice, is merely in fact another version of happiness. An artist can cry about a powerful painting and claim that they are not being simply happy about seeing it, but why do they go back and look again? Because it makes them feel happy to do so, on some level. They are happy about the fact that the painting makes them feel sad. Despite this I’m going to bear infinity in mind from now on and try and notice if it happens to me. The book raised the concept well and this is another reason why I like it.
The books title refers to the fact that the main character is a wallflower socially in the sense that they don’t participate, as the book puts it, as much as the average person. The way in which this is described is very cleverly done. I asked myself whether I fit this title or not but if I do, I only just do because while the wallflower goes to the dance and doesn’t dance (this is coming from the literal definition of the term), I just stay at home. But for a long time I have been proud of the fact that I engage with others only really intellectually and rarely have aimless conversations. So then maybe I am an observer, and I can take some strange pride or happiness from that. The problem with the book in terms of trying to relate to it is that it has a main character that dabbles in all sorts of drugs and alcohol, which of course I stay away from entirely (I don’t even drink coffee). Regardless though I think I’ll use this adjective to describe my aloof position in the future. I can lounge in the strange superiority as I usually do with my arrogance.
So as if obvious from this post, this book has given me a lot to think about. I’m not sure that these various thoughts flying through my head are in fact not simply what every seventeen year old is supposed to do when considering the rest of their lives, and in fact I’m being entirely unoriginal. But I do like to record these things on this blog, which no-one reads, so that I can look back in the future on the futility of it all. Regardless, this book is definately in my top five, and I reiterate: read it, it’s well worth hunting down a copy. Sorry for the unorthadox way of reviewing it.