I have finally found a new book I cannot put down, just in time for stooping season.

And if you’re wondering what the hell stooping is, allow this quite excellent summation from Nicole Kliest at Vogue, In Praise of the New York City Stoop, to enlighten you:

“All hail the stoop. A handsome chunk of stone, carved into an accordion of steps and uniformly arranged as though plucked from a Nora Ephron set. When gazing out from a Brooklyn stoop—the New York City borough regarded as the capital of the “century-old tradition” of stoop sitting—the entire world feels on intimate, haphazard display; a hearty buffet for people watchers where public spats, romantic strolls, and adolescent drama are all on offer. As a 1987 New York Times article correctly professes, Brooklyn’s stoops are ringside seats on urban drama.”

I could not concur more.

Sitting on a stoop in Brooklyn never fails to be an experience of complete surrealism. Even, and perhaps especially, when someone’s reggae music is competing for the spotlight with the beautiful jackhammering of yet another Brownstone renovation. Gentrification is a noisy neighbor.

Another neighbor can currently be seen hauling a canvas the size of a small car down his stoop and into a van. I frequently wonder who the hell these people are.

At any rate, it’s June and the air is warm, and I am sitting outside, reuniting with the always insightful, ever-vulnerable prose of John Green.

I say reuniting because I loved Green as a teenager. “Looking for Alaska”, “Paper Towns”, and all his other wonderful tales of dorky teenage boys falling utterly and inescapably in love with what I would later come to learn were “manic pixie dream girls” shaped my adolescence for better and for worse.

I then surpassed the age of 14 and replaced Green with Patti Smith. Vonnegut. Plath. And in typical late adolescent fashion, I renounced all former interests as sophomoric and childish. Green was a YA romance fiction writer and I no longer held the capacity for such indulgent tales of what I had since learned to be highly unrealistic love stories. I wanted grit. Head in the oven and POW during WWII grit. You remember 17.

Now, years later, I am, of course, returning to my former loves, no longer held hostage by the abject misery of trying to prove myself mature and serious as a teenager. I can color with crayons and read Green novels if I so choose. It’s a wonderful thing.

In doing so, I have stumbled into a collection of non-fiction essays by Green called “The Anthropocene Reviewed” and found that he is a truly phenomenal writer. His prose contains everything I love within it. Brilliance, wit, a sprinkle of existential dread, and a drizzle of sarcasm, all married together with the emotion of a poet.

It is obvious to me now that Green writes YA romance novels not because they sell, but perhaps because they allow one to place their finger on the pulse of one of the most potent and altering experiences of human life—adolescence.

I think he uses teenagers as a means of communicating an extremity of emotion that is so often lost on us as we escape those years. YA fiction might just be a way of reaching back into a time that felt immense, in the face of what might now be an often average, perhaps mundane, likely pretty predictable life.

I speculate this because in reading his first work of non-fiction, I am coming to understand how Green sees the world. He writes,

“We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”

I cannot think of a better thesis for life than that.

In my favorite essay thus far, he expounds upon this thesis through the never-tired lens of “The Great Gatsby.” Titled “Our Capacity for Wonder”, he begins the essay with a quote from the end of Fitzgerald’s iconic novel:

“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

Green notes that it is a “hell of a sentence,” and I agree. But he then crafts a compelling and hopeful rebuttal to it that has me tangled up inside it.

He writes that he was out with his toddler in nature at one point in time, trying to get him to express interest in the infinite horizon.

But his toddler was utterly enraptured, neither by the grandiosity of the world nor the smallness of his place within it, but with a single, brown, fall leaf, something Green admitted could not have been more abundant or ordinary an entity to study. (As a former California kid experiencing seasons for the first time in my 20s, I am completely with the toddler on this one.)

But then, Green writes, he looked at it.

He looked at this stupid little leaf that had done nothing but litter the world for all his life, and he saw something in it he had never seen before. He looked at the veins and how they reached out like our own. He saw the dozens of colors contained within the overarching shade of brown. And he was, to be sure, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

From this moment in the woods, Green arrives at his point. He states that,

“From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.”

To pay more attention to the world is the central, perhaps cliché, pursuit of most writers. We want to milk everything we can out of life to better nourish the well from which we draw. We’re all just highly anxious control freaks, trying to document our existence and fully experience the world before we run out of time. That is nothing new.

But a capacity for wonder is a beautiful way to put it.

What an important measure of how one lives their life.

Do you have a capacity for wonder? Do you have the capacity to pay attention to the world and what it feels like to live in it? Do you have the capacity to enjoy and find the beauty in life, over and over again?

Do you have the capacity to look at a world riddled with unpleasant things, from inexplicable suffering to everyday, mundane, soul-crushing boredom, and find something to be filled with wonder over anyway?

Do you have it in you to love life anyway?

There are few things more valuable and powerful than that capacity to me.