Tread Lightly

"Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either."

I have read numerous books about this subject. The subject of how you leave your mark on the earth is something that many authors write about. But I have never read a book like John Green's, The Fault in our Stars. The other books that I have read put it like this: Every human wants to be remembered, so we all vie for remembrance. But John Green puts it like this, "'Like, if we got organized and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people living people to remember all the dead people?'
       'And are there?'
       'Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare."

       Before reading The Fault in our Stars my opinion in the matter of how to make your mark on life was that you only get one chance to make your mark. But now I realize, if you're that desperate to be remembered, become organized mourners. Don't all remember Hitler, remember that man who died of the bubonic plague at age 24. But if we're all like Hazel, the protagonist in the book, we will tread lightly, and not live life to be remembered, but to live life to be able to remember. In the line, "We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either." I kept thinking about internationally hated people such as Hitler or Osama Bin Laden. What if all they ever wanted was to be remembered? What if they just wanted to make their mark? 

           "We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt attempt to survive our deaths."
           How can we avoid being the dog in this metaphor. How can we reject the human need to survive death. Is everything we have just a way to survive deaths? Are books just a way for authors to make their mark. Do people become firefighters so they can be remembered as the heroic man that saved the lives of innocent fire victims. Is that what drives with the human race on. If so, I think The Fault in our Stars should be a book that everybody reads, because is John Green is really just trying to make his mark, he certainly made his mark on me.