• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 903 0

human; to be exemplary. Those who seek to live well want to live praiseworthy lives; they want this life to mean something, to be “worth it.” And so in dealing with the human condition and in trying to explain why this life is “worth it,” philosophy often must focus on those aspects of life that seem to detract from its meaning and fullness, that seem to make it not worth living; namely, pain and suffering. After all, as much as we’d prefer it were not so, a great deal of life is painful. Dr. Seuss was well aware of this fact, and several of his books dealt with pain and suffering and what type of response to our existence as suffering beings was appropriate. At first blush we might find it odd that a children’s author would focus on pain and suffering, but upon reflection I think there is no more suitable topic. What lesson could be more important for a child to learn than how to deal with the inevitable bang-ups and hang-ups, the lurches and slumps of which this life is invariably constituted? As anyone with children can attest, one of the most important lessons a child can learn, and one of the most difficult—for both the children learning it and the parents watching—is that life will be full of obstacles, disappointments, and basically pain. What good parents do for their children is not remove pain and obstacles from their children’s lives but provide them with the tools necessary in order to deal with the inevitable suffering that life entails.

The lessons in Dr. Seuss’s stories about suffering are varied, but each is fundamentally about the recognition that life is full of discomfort and dealing with it is one of our principal tasks in this life. For example, in Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, the child is guaranteed success, at least with a 98 and ¾ percent chance. One response to life’s pain is (naïve?) optimism; we pat our children on the head and say “It’ll be okay.” But will it? Perhaps we shouldn’t promise success. Instead maybe we ought to offer only contentment. Such a response appears to be offered in Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? Here the child learns that plenty of people have it much worse off than he. The ultimate lesson being, “Some critters are much-much, oh, ever so much-much, so muchly much-much more unlucky than you!” (Lucky). So we might tell children: “It could be worse, you could be . . .” But just because it could be worse doesn’t mean that your suffering is acceptable. Things could always be worse, that doesn’t mean that how they are now is okay. And should the suffering of other people make me feel good? So what other options are we left with? Well, what about sheer resignation. We might just respond, “Deal with it!” Don’t lie about how they’ll win in the end. Just simply say, “Suck it up.” Dr. Seuss says about as much in You’re Only Old Once!, a book whose title is oddly ambiguous. It could mean, “You’re only old once, so enjoy it. Make the most of it,” or it could mean, “Thank goodness, you’re only old once. It’ll all be over soon.” Maybe we ought to just resign ourselves to the fact that life is painful, but at least it ends. But these are all unsatisfying responses to the human condition, and surely a playful, fun-loving author like Dr. Seuss can offer us more. Thankfully, the answers above don’t exhaust Dr. Seuss’s repertoire. There is one last possibility, and one story I haven’t yet mentioned, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.

And that’s how it started.

In Solla Sollew we are introduced to our protagonist, who by his own admission has had a pretty easy life up to this point. “Nothing, not anything ever went wrong” (Trouble). So he has been fortunate enough to have a carefree life, one of ease and contentment; a life that resembles many children we may know. When we think of children who are well taken care of we think of them as problem free. They don’t have mortgages and debt, illness or debilitation, a lifetime of piled up failures, stress, anxiety. . . . Most children’s lives are not full of the pain we all experience. They have yet to suffer the spiritual death by