Aging With Calvin and Hobbes: The Platypus Reads CCLXV

-
Doing the math the other night, I realized that I am older than Calvin's parents as they appear in the strip.  That's odd: realizing that I have an edge on the immutable authorities of Calvin and Hobbes' world.  It's not that I haven't realized I'm aging or anything.  In grad school I noticed that I was starting to look quite a bit like Calvin's father.  Now I'm older.  I have a beard and all my hair is gone.  That's the thing about art: we age but it remains the same.  Achilles will always be young and powerful, but we won't, and therein lies an opportunity.  Art freezes time so that we who are moving in time can continue to look at the frozen moment.  The art doesn't change, but each change in us offers the opportunity to reengage with the work and draw fresh insights from it.

Bill Watterson said that the world of a comic like Calvin and Hobbes is very fragile.  I think I'm beginning to see what he meant.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

-
Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo
Read more

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

-
I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games.  Aren't they just for kids, and boys wh
Read more