Maybe little children make the best philosophers.
William Steig may have thought so. “Children are genuine,” he said in an
interview, and his much-awarded books for children deal with serious issues of
life and death and everything in between: ambition, fulfillment, love,
abandonment, family, restoration and magic. (Be careful what you wish for. Sylvester
and the Magic Pebble) In 1984, at the age of 77, he published Yellow and
Pink, one of his lesser known but, I think, most important books.
Yellow and Pink are two articulated wooden dolls who have just realized that they
exist. In 28 pages, they pit their wooden brains against the great existential
questions: Who are we? What are we? Where did we come from?
Pink studies the remarkable structure of Yellow
and decides “Someone must have made us.” Yellow looks at the same evidence and
insists they are too intricate for a creator. He’s never seen such a person, so
he must not exist. “I say we’re an accident, somehow or other, we just
happened.” Pink laughs. Being able to reach, turn, breathe, walk “just
happened, by some kind of fluke? That’s preposterous!”
Yellow reaches for
“time and chance” to explain the existence of sentient dolls. “With enough
time—a thousand, a million, maybe two and a half million years—lots of unusual
things could happen.” He envisions a walking guitar, an arrow-head tree, a
snake with a goofy caterpillar face, a five-legged, four-armed creature with
two heads. “Why not us?”
But Pink wants
specifics. Yellow thinks hard about how legs might have come about. Ah! A chunk
of wood fell from a tree and split on a rock. Arms, fingers and toes? After
eons, a lightning strike forms them. Eyes? Wrought by woodpeckers. Or
hailstones. But how do we see and hear
through such holes? “Because that’s what eyes and ears are for, dummy. What
else would you do with them?” says Yellow.
Then,
for a second doll, the process repeats, maybe over a million years, and
produces the chubbier Pink. How he and Yellow got their colors is the next
challenge. Each of them must have rolled through a puddle of spilled paint,
yellow for Yellow and pink for Pink, with precise drops of black or white to
make their buttons. Yellow changes the subject. “But why are we arguing on such
a fine day?”
Most of Steig’s heroes (and villains) are animals
in a fairy-tale world where children can marvel at Pearl the pig, Sylvester the
donkey, Dr. DeSoto, a mouse, Amos and Boris, a mouse and whale, and even the
ogre Shrek. Yellow and Pink stand out as not animals, but not exactly human
either, though they deal with human dilemmas and related questions.
The punch line in the
story is the appearance of “a man who needed a haircut.” He shambles and hums
out of tune as he comes to claim the dolls. My guess is that this man is the
fairy-tale version of Steig himself. Some old portraits online might be taken
as evidence of his needing a haircut. I wonder whether he heard this from a
wife, from time to time.
The book-man has a
moustache, but a later photo shows that apparently by the time he grew a
moustache, Steig had developed a shiny dome. Thin evidence, I grant. But he was
a creator, and what he knew of the process of creation might well have inspired
the questions of Yellow and Pink. He drew his characters boldly, just
the way he wanted. But do they recognize him? Tucked under their maker’s arm,
Yellow asks “Who is this guy?”
Pink doesn’t know.
If I had to guess
which side of the creation- versus- accident debate Steig would come down on,
besides his own creativity, I would draw on the dedication that precedes the
story.
“To some recent arrivals: Jonas, Jonathan, Nathaniel, Max, Paige, Will,
Serena.” Sounds like grandchildren to me. New little human beings coming into
the world can make you think about the big questions. In a few years, they ask
the perennial “Why?” And they insist on an answer too. Maybe little children
are the best philosophers.
