taluluto:

John Green is a living refutation to the law of conservation of meaning. It is astounding. This man takes words which, by themselves, have meanings– perfectly good meanings, words which impart concepts or ideas which, when spoken to an English speaker, make understandable sense– and he manages, somehow, I have no idea how he does it, to arrange them in such a way that although they are grammatically correct, they mean absolutely nothing at all. Let me show you what I mean.

Read this sentence from the first page of his novel “The Fault in our Stars”:

Depression is a side effect of dying. Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.

What does any of this mean? The surrounding sentences gave little to no oh my god I really cant do this.

i was going to keep going and being honestly analytical but i couldnt possibly say anything to make you understand what i mean more than the sentence ‘cancer is also a side effect of dying’ on its own. just read that. just read those words, in that order,over and over. i cant take my eyes off it. fuck, look at it. look at this fucking sentence. this is an eldritch sentence. it’s like being in one of those rooms where all the walls are mirrors and seeing yourself reflected over and over infinitely. there’s not even an abyss of meaninglessness to gaze into because that would imply depth.

It’s like a romantic speaker translated a phrase directly without altering the sentence to fit the proper order of wording. Like if someone whose native language is french wanted to say “dying is a side effect of cancer” but didn’t swap the adjective and the subject so it sounds backwards.