Calvin and Hobbes and Rejecting the Grind, or Why I Love Snow Days

This week I'm wrong about the best comic strip of all time, plus a quick plug for the movie American Fiction

Today is the first time in 701 days there is snow on the ground in New York.

Beyond that being an excellent argument against me contributing to a Roth-IRA, it is making me very happy, and I’ve had several lovely, chilly walks over the past 24 hours.

I’ve always loved the snow. Sledding, snowball fights, skiing, snow forts, and every other snow-based shenanigan were staples of my childhood and too rarely have been highlights of my adult life.

Snow feels like possibility. It covers things up and cancels plans and makes the world more quiet and beautiful. The mundane feels magical. Even sitting alone inside on a snowy day feels more satisfying and less guilt-inducing.

I’ve been sipping my coffee and looking out the window and thinking about the snow, and I realized how many of my best snow-memories were directly inspired by Calvin and Hobbes.

This post is about to become a love letter to Bill Watterson’s late 20th century comic strip, one of the greatest pieces of art ever created, full stop. So let me make the connection I’m drawing a little clearer.

For those unfamiliar (I’m hoping there’s very few of you), Calvin is a six year old whose best friend is a tiger named Hobbes. Hobbes is a stuffed animal, but the beauty of the strip is that it embraces the reality of Hobbes—the way he is fully, physically and emotionally and intellectually, present for Calvin.

Calvin and Hobbes are constantly outside. They roam the countryside, ride sleds and wagons through wild terrain, build forts, and have adventures and expeditions. In the winter, they create massive and inventive snow sculptures—aliens, monsters, giants, animals, etc. Some of my favorite examples:

To my childhood self, these sculptures were wildly aspirational. I spent hours outside with my friends recreating them to the best of our ability, and inventing other snow-monstrosities of our own.

They also capture something more general about the strip—there is no boundary between Calvin’s imagination and his reality. He sees a monster and he creates it in the snow. He sees Hobbes as a real tiger and therefore he is. He imagines himself as a private eye (Tracer Bullet), a superhero (Stupendous Man), or as any other number of creatures or objects. Calvin’s entire perspective is possibility—his perception of the world is fundamentally built around what he can do, and making it so. That’s why he’s always outside, away from the hard boundaries of buildings and school and routines. As a child, that is a dream. I couldn’t put it in words when I was younger but that’s why I loved the strip.

I don’t want to over-intellectualize this—the whole strip is hilarious and silly, too—but that breakdown of the line between the real and the “unrealistic” is central to its greatness and why it has only become more resonant over the years, and why I also love it as an adult.

Calvin’s ability to live in a world without limitations is what makes him weird and a bit of an outcast and causes the (funny, charming) disconnects with his parents and teachers and classmates. He lives a truly, radically free existence within his mind, and he can’t understand the arbitrary enforced limitations of the “real,” adult world. Homework, strict rules of decorum in school, the requirement to go to a boring job every day—Calvin’s lived fantasies are attempts to put those constricting forces into a setting that actually makes more sense to him—or at least to make a mockery of those things. Here are some more snow-based examples, most lampooning his Dad taking part in the monotonous existence of a job-based “reality,” or protesting the similar limitations his parents put on him.

Obviously vegetables and going to sleep are actually good things, but Calvin doesn’t have the framework to understand them (and the adults in the strip usually follow the “because I said so” model of justification)—his imagination allows him to express himself within and understand the seemingly random rules of modern life, and the indignities and nuisances they create.

As a (former) teacher, Calvin reminds me of my former students who can’t sit still or follow directions the first time, but when allowed to follow their own instincts and creative urges are brilliant and insightful and motivated. Carla Shalaby’s book Troublemakers is entirely about these kids and how their rebellion against school rules is actually a way of communicating how we’ve created environments that limit, rather than nurture, possibility and freedom for everyone, including the rule-followers and teachers. She argues that these kids should be our guides, not our nuisances, as we imagine school environments that serve all children and adults.

Calvin’s inner existence is one of total freedom, and that is all that allows him to understand and respond to the infinite ways our world limits possibility. He is one of Shalaby’s troublemakers. That’s what makes the strip funny, but also legitimately profound and directive for us as adults.

Calvin is often a stand-in for Watterson himself. He is deeply skeptical of the modern world—how it obfuscates, how it makes us busy, how it distracts us from what’s important. He refused to monetize Calvin and Hobbes beyond selling books, despite the potential to make probably hundreds of millions of dollars doing so. He ended the strip while it was still popular, unwilling to be trapped by success. Entire documentaries have been made about how impossible he is to find or talk to. His life and work are rejections of a mindset of more, of consumption, of work. Calvin needs his mind and maybe a cardboard box to live any reality he wants. Watterson’s reclusiveness is another recognition of that power in possibility, and how almost every industrial, technological infringement on our daily lives through work and “convenience” is actually a way to steal some of that possibility and monetize it.

The most heartwarming strips from the comic make that message, and its applicability to all of us, not just children, crystal clear.

Both Calvin’s and Watterson’s freedom are connected to the stories they tell (and don’t tell) about themselves and about the world. Watterson tells Calvin’s story and refuses to make his own life a commodity. Calvin tells stories to and about himself constantly—that’s part of why Hobbes is actually real to him, and it’s his entire framework for existing—because there are no limitations in a story.

So why am I thinking about Calvin and Hobbes today? Because on snow days, when we can’t go to work and we can’t drive a car, and if we’re really lucky we can’t do anything “productive” at all, and we have to just exist in the world—and if we’re privileged enough to not have to do those things anyway just to survive—we get a little glimpse of Calvin’s freedom, the freedom that children like Calvin can access effortlessly and then gets beaten out of us as we grow older—an existence without guilt for not doing what we’re “supposed to” do and without (or at least with fewer) arbitrary demands on our time and attention and emotions. It’s a freedom worth striving to reclaim, to the extent that’s possible. It starts by imagining yourself in a different story than what those obstacles and boundaries and barriers are telling you.

A good way to start might be going to your local bookstore, or even better your local library, and getting a Calvin and Hobbes collection to read. I hope you all have a snowy day soon.

Another Lesson from Calvin and Hobbes

I show this to all my students.

As the previously mentioned “conveniences” of the modern world have spread, so has the ability for language to make things more confusing.

This is my all-time favorite Calvin and Hobbes strip, because it so perfectly captures the desire to sound smart rather than be understood, to impress rather than communicate.

I’m just bringing it to your attention so it can brighten your life just as much as it has mine. Teachers, students love this one too.

See American Fiction

This week I saw American Fiction, Cord Jefferson’s new movie about a talented but not financially successful writer, who decides to write a stereotypically “Black” novel under a pseudonym as a joke and protest, and is horrified to reach new levels of professional success as a result. The premise is already darkly hilarious, but I was actually more moved by the depth and care that went into the family drama that grounds the movie, and the thoughtfulness and reflectiveness the film reaches in its third act. I don’t want to spoil it, but go watch it—its much more than an intellectual spoof. Then call me so we can talk about it.