WE ALL LOOKED UP by Tommy Wallach

Having only two months till an asteroid will hit the Earth, four adolescents are forced to look at their life from different points of view.

The character that appealed to me was Peter. At the age of 18 years old, he seems to have everything figured out already: he was the star of the basketball team, he received a Jeep for his sweet sixteen and he had a girlfriend. On top of this he was accepted at the Stanford university.

Yet, he wasn’t a superficial boy. And his history’s teacher is the one that helps Peter to grow up.

“They’d been learning about the phrase: “Pyrrhic victory”, which came from Roman times and meant that you’d won something, like a battle, but in order to win, you had to lose so much that you really hadn’t won at all.”

“- What about if you were a big sports star, and you made loads of money, and you bought big houses and you drove fast cars, but when your time in the limelight was over, you ended up unhappy because you didn’t know what the point of your life had been?
Would that be a Pyrrhic victory?”

“- Peter, I’m sorry if it seemed like I was criticising you today.
I like you. And I’ve seen a lot of popular kids go through this school. Most kids wouldn’t have given a second thought to what I said. So why do you think it’s made such an impression on you?

– I don’t know.

– Okay. Then let me ask you this- what is it that makes a book really good?

– I don’t really read that much. Outside of homework, of course.

– Then I’ll tell you.
The best books, they don’t talk about things you never thought about before. They talk about things you’d always thought about, but that you didn’t think anyone else had thought about.
You read them, and suddenly you’re a little bit less alone in the world.
You’re part of this cosmic community of people who’ve thought about this thing, whatever it happens to be.

Think that’s what happened to you today. This fear, of squandering your future, was already on your mind. I just underlined it for you.

– Maybe.”

Kindle, 2015