Dust Speck
… “I’M SIGNIFICANT! … SCREAMED THE DUST SPECK” Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, October 14, 1993 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/10/14
Calvin and Hobbes was a big part of my youth. In a time before endless scrolling and oversaturation of content, I would often pick up the tattered copies of Watterson's collections and flip through aimlessly looking for a laugh or profound insight. Now I have the monolithic complete collection of Calvin and Hobbes which lends itself less to casual browsing on the couch, so I get my daily dose from the subreddit and various other locations that offer reruns of the strip. I need to start picking up the original individual books again when I come across them, if for their handy-ness more than anything else. I vividly remember some of the more thoughtful strips reflecting on the life the universe, and everything from a 6 year old's point of view while sledding, riding in a wagon, or staring at the sky, rather than the normal feeding trough of religious content, academic philosophy, and science fiction that consumed most of my time. Not to mention the vocabulary I had to look up on a regular basis. What 6 year old uses "SIMIAN COUNTENANCE" in insults??
I never really made his connection to the Absurd when I was younger, and maybe that's because Watterson doesn't truly make the leap into that realm, even if he does specifically ask these questions like on July 30, 1995 (more on this in a later post). In either case, in my recent readings and humble opinion Calvin is nothing if not an Absurd Hero. In several strips (that as I come across them again I'll link to later), he repeatedly contemplates the unresponsiveness of the universe and the meaning of life, and decides that even though there is no meaning, "that there are more important things than what people do all day" and that perhaps searching for meaning is a waste of time for him, and he should just do other things like look under rocks (June 30, 1992).
One thing that struck me, was the closeness of this strip to and the others where Calvin gazes at the sky, and thinks about his insignificance and the universe's unresponsiveness, and content from Camus. It specifically and concisely represents the sentence in "An Absurd Reasoning" in the Myth of Sisyphus, "The absurd is born of this confrontation between the need and unreasonable silence of the world." Watterson captures this in the silence represented in the first and third panels, and short but meaningful dialog of the other two. This feeling is also conveyed in some of the last sentences of The Stranger.
In the Matthew Ward translation:
"… for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world."
the parallels are there, but perhaps more obvious, at least for me, in the earlier English translation by Stuart Gilbert:
"… emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe."
Calvin is obviously coming to this from a different place, but not unlike in The Stranger he's also often filled with rage and existential angst of his own brand.
Finally, in something I'll examine more later, he pre-empts a profound dialog in Rick and Morty by suggesting we just watch tv: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/04/23
(as a side-note, I also think Rick's ship looks a lot like Spaceman Spiff's)
-DA
Also, in searching for others take on this, here's a nice quick piece:
https://u.osu.edu/rudolph1023/2016/04/22/calvin-and-hobbes/
There's a ton of other content out there on Calvin and Hobbes and philosophy, but here's another good starting point https://sites.tufts.edu/phil4chil/2018/06/05/teaching-philosophy-with-calvin-and-hobbes/
And for those interested, here's the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/
And the full inks to the comics above:
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/06/30 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/10/14
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1994/01/29
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/04/23
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/07/30
And in case you haven't seen it go, watch Dear Mr. Watterson (2013) it's on Amazon Prime.
