Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [33]
The braggarts lack intellectual integrity because they embrace beliefs that are vague, unverifiable, and unimportant. They each want it to be true that they are the superior animal, and so they believe it to be true. Further, they won’t be content until their superiority is accepted. But Seuss recognizes that this temptation doesn’t simply catch those poor ignoble characters of whom we expect no better. Even noble desires for certain states of affairs can seduce us. Seuss invites us to indulge in just such a fantasy in Horton Hatches the Egg.
Mayzie, a lazy new mother bird, wishes to get a break from sitting on her egg. She begs Horton to take over and promises to return shortly, but she soon decides not to return, preferring her stay in Palm Beach to the burdens of motherhood. Good-hearted Horton sits through storms and seasons, through ridicule and even the threat of death. His resolve to stay sitting has him being hauled over mountains and across the ocean and then around the country in a circus until he reaches Palm Beach. Mayzie, breaking from her sunbathing, swoops in to see the circus that has come to town, only to find Horton still on her egg. At just that moment, the egg begins to hatch. Wretched Mayzie screams that she wants her egg back, accusing Horton of stealing it, and Horton brokenheartedly withdraws. But when the eggshell breaks open a winged little elephant flies over to Horton. Seuss ends the poem with an emphatic “IT’S AN ELEPHANT-BIRD!! And it should be, it should be, it SHOULD be like that! Because Horton was faithful! He sat and he sat!” (Hatches). Horton, unlike Mayzie, upheld his word, and the humans deliver Horton back home with his new child.
Here Seuss is moved by the moral worthiness of Horton compared to the undeserving, lazy bird mother, Mayzie. Adult readers recognize that Seuss’s repeated insistence, based on moral appropriateness (i.e., “it should be, it should be, it SHOULD be . . .”), implicitly acknowledges that outside the world of the poem such an egg could not really house an elephant-bird. We want it to be so, though. And it seems implausible that the same humans who would hunt an elephant to kill it, then decide to capture it to exploit it as a circus act, would suddenly opt to release it. An elephant with a winged offspring would fetch more attention than an elephant sitting on an egg, after all. Yet we would like things to end well for Horton, wouldn’t we? We want it to be the case that virtue is rewarded in the end, and vice punished. This is a noble desire to have, but it may lead us to deny the sometimes harsh realities of our lives and leave us unprepared to deal with them when they inevitably strike. Beyond self-esteem, insecurity, or even a desire for meaning and purpose, there may also be aesthetic reasons for deluding ourselves, as Marco clearly illustrates.
In And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, we find Marco, a young boy who would prefer that he have an interesting story to tell about what he sees on his walk home from school to the drudgery of what he actually encounters. He knows his father instructed him not to tell outlandish tales and not to exaggerate the truth, but his creativity and urge to embellish the facts of the matter have his mind overflowing with possibilities. He continuously revises the plain horse and wagon he saw into more and more fanciful visions, until he has dreamt up