In her strange and beautiful interactive memoir Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal, published in 2016, she wrote, “If one is generously contracted 80 years, that amounts to 29,220 days on Earth. Playing that out, how many times then, really, do I get to look at a tree? 12,395? There has to be an exact number. Let’s just say it is 12,395. Absolutely, that is a lot, but it is not infinite, and anything less than infinite seems too measly a number and is not satisfactory.” In her writing, Amy often sought to reconcile the infinite nature of consciousness and love and yearning with the finite nature of the universe and all that inhabits it. Toward the end of Textbook, she wrote a multiple-choice question: “In the alley, there is a bright pink flower peeking out through the asphalt. A. It looks like futility. B. It looks like hope.” For me at least, “Auld Lang Syne” captures exactly what it feels like to see a bright pink flower peeking out through the asphalt, and how it feels to know you have 12,395 times to look at a tree.

Amy found out she had cancer not long after finishing Textbook, and she called me. She knew that in the years after my book The Fault in Our Stars was published, I’d come to know many young people who were gravely ill, and she wanted to know if I had advice for her. I told her what I think is true—that love survives death. But she wanted to know how young people react to death. How her kids would. She wanted to know if her kids and her husband would be okay, and that ripped me up. Although I’m usually quite comfortable talking with sick people, with my friend I found myself stumbling over words, overwhelmed by my own sadness and worry.

They won’t be okay, of course, but they will go on, and the love you poured into them will go on. That’s what I should’ve said. But what I actually said, while crying, was, “How can this be happening? You do so much yoga.”

In my experience, dying people often have wonderful stories of the horrible things healthy people say to them, but I’ve never heard of anybody saying something as stupid as, “You do so much yoga.” I hope that Amy at least got some narrative mileage out of it. But I also know I failed her, after she was there for me so many times. I know she forgives me—present tense—but still, I desperately wish I could’ve said something useful. Or perhaps not said anything at all. When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes—often, in fact—you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.”

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“Auld Lang Syne” was a popular song during World War I—versions of it were sung in trenches not just by British soldiers, but by French and German and Austrian ones as well, and the song even played a small role in one of the strangest and most beautiful moments in world history, the Christmas Truce of 1914.

On Christmas Eve that year, along part of the war’s Western Front in Belgium, around one hundred thousand British and German troops emerged from their trenches and met one another in the so-called no-man’s-land between front lines. Nineteen-year-old Henry Williamson wrote his mother, “Yesterday the British and Germans met and shook hands in the ground between the trenches and exchanged souvenirs . . . Marvellous, isn’t it?” A German soldier remembered that a British soldier “brought a soccer ball from their trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued. How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was.” Elsewhere on the front, Captain Sir Edward Hulse recalled a Christmas sing-along that “ended up with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ which we all, English, Scots, Irish, Prussians, Wuttenbergers, etc., joined in. It was absolutely astounding, and if I had seen it on a cinematograph film I should have sworn that it was faked.”

Hulse, who was twenty-five years old at the time, would be killed on the Western Front less than four months later. At least seventeen million people would die as a direct result of the war—more than half the current population of Canada. By Christmas of 1916, soldiers didn’t want truces—the devastating losses of the war, and the growing use of poison gas, had embittered the combatants. But many also had no idea why they were fighting and dying for tiny patches of ground so far from home. In the British trenches, soldiers began to sing the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” with different words: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

Here was a world without whys, where life was meaninglessness all the way down. Modernity had come to war, and to the rest of life. The art critic Robert Hughes once referred to the “peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition,” and the trenches of World War I were hell indeed.

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Although she was a playful and optimistic writer, Amy was not deluded about the nature of suffering, or about its centrality in human life. Her work—whether picture book or memoir—always finds a way to acknowledge misery without giving in to it. One of the last lines she ever wrote was, “Death may be knocking on my door, but I’m not getting out of this glorious bath to answer it.”

In her public appearances, Amy would sometimes use that recursive lament of British soldiers and transform it without ever changing the tune or the words. She would ask an audience to sing that song with her: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” And although it’s a profoundly nihilistic song written about the modernist hell of repetition, singing this song with Amy, I could always see the hope in it. It became a statement that we are here—meaning that we are together, and not alone. And it’s also a statement that we are, that we exist. And it’s a statement that we are here, that a series of astonishing unlikelihoods has made us possible and here possible. We might never know why we are here, but we can still proclaim in hope that we are here. I don’t think such hope is foolish or idealistic or misguided.

We live in hope—that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. And between now and then, we are here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

I give auld lang syne five stars.

GOOGLING STRANGERS

WHEN I WAS A KID, my mother often told me that everyone has a gift inside them. You might be an extraordinarily astute listener of smooth jazz, or a defensive midfielder with an uncommon understanding of how to open up space with the perfect pass. But as a child, I always felt like I had no inborn gift. I wasn’t a particularly good student, and I had no athletic ability. I couldn’t read social cues. I sucked at piano, karate, ballet dancing, and everything else my parents tried to sign me up for. I thought of myself as a person without a specialty.

But as it turned out, my specialty just hadn’t been invented yet, because I am—please forgive the lack of modesty here—really, really good at googling strangers. Sure, I’ve put in the work—Malcolm Gladwell famously said it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert in a field; I’ve clocked my ten thousand hours, and then some. But also, I just have a knack for it.

I google strangers almost every day. If my wife and I have to attend a party—and I say have to because that is my relationship with parties*—I usually research all the known attendees in advance. Of course, I know it’s weird when a stranger tells you they are in the carpet installation business and you answer, “Oh yeah, I am aware. Also, you met your wife in 1981, when you were both working at the same savings and loan institution in Dallas. She was living at home with her parents, Joseph and Marilyn, at least according to census records, while you had recently graduated from Oklahoma Baptist University. Your wedding reception at the Dallas Museum of Art was right next to that Dale Chihuly sculpture, Hart Window. Then you moved to Indianapolis for your wife’s job at Eli Lilly. How is the carpet business these days? Do you guys have, like, a rivalry with hardwood floor people?”

It’s horrifying, how much information can be accessed via Google about almost all of us. Of course, this loss of privacy has come with tremendous benefits—free storage of photos and video, a chance to participate in large-scale discourse via social media, and the opportunity to easily keep in touch with friends from long ago.

But giving so much of our selves to private corporations like Google makes other people feel comfortable sharing their selves. This feedback loop—we all want to be on Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook—has led to me making so much of my life publicly available that when creating accounts on new social media platforms, I often struggle to find security questions that can’t be answered by studying my old social media accounts. Where did I go to elementary school? That’s easy enough to find out. What was the name of my first dog? I’ve vlogged about our miniature dachshund Red Green. Who was your childhood best friend? You’ll find baby pictures of us tagged together on Facebook. What was your mother’s maiden name? You can’t be serious.

But even though less of our lives belong to us and more of our lives belong to the companies that host and gather our browsing habits and hobbies and keystrokes, even though I am revolted by how easy it has become to scroll through the lives of the living and the dead, even though it all feels a bit too much like an Orwell novel . . . I can’t outright condemn the googling of strangers.

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