Why “Everything Matters!”
Reading for school is easily my least favorite reason for reading. A tangentially related reason is reading a book that a teacher recommends. Now, I was the kind of student to befriend teachers rather than peers, and the teachers I befriended were usually in the English department. My AP Literature teacher took two class periods one semester because I also took his Villains in Literature class the first semester it was offered, and it ruled. He would not stop pestering me to read this book, “Everything Matters!” by Ron Currie Jr.
To this day, I still don’t actually care for reading the book, but I praise its gist. The book isn’t really about a character, but about life and death, much like last month’s read of “They Both Die at the End” by Adam Silvera. Instead of knowing when one person is going to die, the main character knows exactly when the entire world is going to end. Essentially, the human race is going to be taken out like the dinosaurs, with a huge meteor, and Junior Thibodeau is the only one that knows.
As you can probably guess, people don’t believe him when he says that the world will end when he is thirty-six. Put yourself in his shoes and you may also turn to questionable habits, fixations on whatever it takes to distract yourself from the fact that the entire world will be blown into oblivion before you’re likely to retire. It would be pretty difficult to believe that anything you do will have any actual importance. Do you indulge in your most basic desires? Do you try to figure out how to stop the world from ending? How can you live in the moment and find joy when you know how it will all end?
Junior goes through just about everything, including all five stages of grief as it pertains to the end of existence. Ron Currie Jr. assesses this kind of life as a hyperbolic instance of what is essentially an existential crisis. While most people contemplate the concept of death, they can at least try to comfort themselves by imagining the world they leave behind and the mark they left on it, whether that be children or a business or what have you. Junior, however, knows there will be no world left for anyone’s legacy to live on in.
The title was chosen perfectly to fit the theme of the novel, “Everything Matters!” Through Junior’s struggle with his family and genuinely allowing himself to care, he finds that what you do right now, from moment to moment, is just as important as what will happen. The end of the world can wait. Right now, there are things to do and people to love, whether it’s by trying to save their life or by setting down your work to toss around a ball with them.
