Just Peanuts

Yesterday, I was at N's place because I needed very badly to believe in the goodness of tragedy and what it does to the soul. There must be some point to why life gets progressively worse as we grow older. As we graduate from classrooms to cubicles, from one kind of box to another, from one kind of chair to another, from one kind of lunch box to another...there must be some reason to these boxes. These endless patterns that we weave out like lotus eaters, too drugged to stop, too supine to protest.

I promise to be less elegiac from this point.

So N suggested that I read Peanuts. And I did. I took the book home and I read strips from it till I fell asleep. Schulz has this immense ability to make you laugh while wincing. It is amazing that a lone, depressed man could sit day after day and work on these strips all by himself. It is amazing that he could draw as well as he could write. That Charlie Brown's talent for failure couldn't have been drawn in any other way. That tragedy should be so funny. I love Linus's tiny T-shirt with horizontal stripes. Lucy's lectures. The impossible loveliness of the little red-haired girl (a girl Schulz was in love with in real life). Snoopy's typewriter. It is incredible that a man of such genius should have been depressed. The book has little notes by Schulz...his inspirations for a particular strip, an anecdote. A sliver of memory. Remembered pain. Love.

Is Peanuts children's literature? The main characters are all children, but the issues he engages with are ones that are rarely found in children's literature. Though they are very much part of childhood, a phase in life when you are not allowed to make any decisions. It is only as one becomes an adult, a person who HAS to make decisions, that one realizes the beautiful gift of indecision that we were once blessed with.

You might not get everything about Peanuts as a child-reader. It's one of those rare pieces of literature that changes before your eyes every time you read it because you have changed. Every time you read it, you unravel a secret about yourself. A smile you never knew you had. If children's literature should have magic, what bigger magic than this? A strip that grows with you. Changes with you. Understands your pain. Owns your failures. Makes you laugh. Teaches you wisdom.

I don't know why the red-haired girl in Schulz's life refused him. In a way, she did great because Peanuts wouldn't be Peanuts if she hadn't. Thank god she was insane.

S