Great Perhaps

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps. That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.”- John Green, Looking for Alaska

In one of his famous letters, Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, “My only anxiety is how can I be of use in the world?” He painted like a man gasping for air; thick strokes of yellow and blue, dim stars and dying sunflowers. He sold one painting in his lifetime. And yet now, his art glows in quiet rooms, in many museums around the world dedicated to his work. One of them is the Getty museum in Los Angeles. In a museum that holds over 250,000 artworks, I saw his Irises with the biggest crowd gathered around. Van Gogh never lived to see the world understand him, but perhaps he didn’t paint for the world. Perhaps he painted for the Great Perhaps — that fragile hope that someone, someday, would look at his work and feel less alone, almost like someone lent an ear.

Franz Kafka, on the other hand, wanted to vanish entirely. On his deathbed, he begged his friend Max Brod to burn all his unpublished works. Brod disobeyed. And from those ashes that never burned came The Trial, The Castle, Amerika — stories of alienation that became a mirror for the modern soul. Kafka never sought immortality, but immortality found him anyway in over 40 languages to which his works have been translated. Strange how the guy who never thought he was good enough to be seen at all became one of the most seen authors of the 20^th century. His “perhaps” was not chosen, but bestowed — an afterlife, quite literary.

Another one is F. Scott Fitzgerald, who believed himself forgotten. When The Great Gatsby was published, it slipped quietly into obscurity. It sold less than 25,000 copies in the 15 years between its publication in 1925 and Fitzgerald’s death in 1940. However, long after his death, it was reprinted as a pocket-sized book for American soldiers in World War II. The Council on Books at the time viewed these pocket books as weapons in Nazi Germany, where not only were people’s territories sought to be controlled, but also their beliefs. In a world of state-sanctioned book burnings with over a 100 million books destroyed, Gatsby’s impossible longing spread like wildfire. The book that once failed became a symbol of yearning itself, with 30 million copies sold around the world, 5 film adaptations, countless theatrical productions, and even a video game made on it. Whether the novel rescued the soldiers or the soldiers rescued the novel is a question that perhaps needs no answer.

And then there was Sylvia Plath, hardly known outside poetry circles while alive, but one of the most recognizable voices of the 20^th century in death. Her works Ariel and The Bell Jar were published after her death in 1963, creating a legacy as one of the most read and admired poets of the 20^th century, and winning her a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Critics said her poems made “poetry and death inseparable,” as though she had written them from the other side she wrote about so vividly. What’s different about Plath is that she’s almost defined by her death, and her fame almost attributed to it. She wrote in Lady Lazarus, one of the poems published after she was gone, “Dying / is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.”

I remember learning a poem called Ozymandias in my 10^th-grade English class about a king whose statue lies broken in the desert, his proud words half-buried in sand — “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing else remained, time had levelled his empire into dust. This poem is one of those things I find myself thinking about more often than you’d think. I find the imagery strangely comforting; the fact that an entire empire was erased, but the poem — a mere 14 lines remains. Art outlives the hand that made it. Almost like a quiet defiance of time.

Perhaps the Great Perhaps isn’t about fame or recognition at all. It’s about faith — the belief that something we create, or feel, or love might outlive us. I thought of starting this blog, unsure of whether anyone would even read it, because I came to the realisation that I need to do something that keeps me going, something that makes me truly happy and writing about the most random things ever is just a way I’m going to try doing that. When I told my friend, he said if I do decide to share my writing, there’s at least one person who wants to read it.