Blogging Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith Part 9

I can't.

We're nearing the end here.

I'm not sure I know what to write.

GRASSHOPPER JUNGLE dropped on the world last night. Some people knew about it.

The sections I read since the last post were all part of PART 4: THE END OF THE WORLD. They were not called: WE, THE NEW HUMANS • LAST LEGS • DAVY CROCKETT AND DANIEL BOONE NEVER WORE COONSKIN CAPS •GARLIC, DR PEPPER, AND CRYSTAL METH • CLICKETY CLICKETY • ON THE ROOF AGAIN • DENNY DRAYTON HAS A GUN, MOTHERFUCKER • EXILE IN EDEN • A CHANCE MEETING UNDER A PORTRAIT OF A PRESBYTERIAN, OR, CALVIN COOLIDGE'S CANOE • A MOST SOOTHING SHOWER HEAD • INFINITA MILITES! INFINITA MILITES!

I'm personally frustrated, for professional and personal reasons, but those topics lie beyond the scope of this post.

The scope of this post, other than a vessel for the expression of my own Olympic satiation, is really basically pretty much just here to discuss one line.

This is not the best line in the book. But it's close.

It's probably the second best line I've ever read, in any book, ever written.

It reads:

Besides fucking and eating, a few of us human beings are driven to paint on the walls of caves.

I mean, seriously? Have you ever fucking read a single goddamn sentence that was so insightful? Laid out like the honest blood stains of a deserving victim in a gangster flick, in nineteen little words? Not one single member of their choir weighing in at over two syllables?

Me either.

Ponder their message for a minute.

I realize, full well, that two thirds of that message is somewhat juvenilve. Even for the less Victorian, even the scientific implications are somewhat rudimentary.

But the third. Oh saints that be, the third sentiment is the one! Why? Why are we? Why do we exist? Why do we matter? How do we feel? Why do we feel? In what way do those things matter? And why, and how, and when and in what way do any of those mean anything to any of us, ever, and forever, and when and why and how, and ... you know what I mean.

It's one of those lines. One of those Vonnegut or Thompson or Irving or Robbins lines that makes a classic American author a neverending classic.

As we near the end of this journey together, you, you five readers, and I, your dear and lonely author, we find ourselves at the crossroads of the obsoletion of blogs, and I hope that if I leave these posts up, eventually someone will find them who finds some meaning in them, but even if that never happens, I'm glad to have had something to say, for the second or third or whatever time, about the greatest young adult novel ever written.