As a lifelong reader of Calvin and Hobbes, there have been many times where Bill Watterson’s words and drawings struck a deep chord with me. When I was a kid, there were times I’d see Calvin traipsing through the forest, and it would prompt me to go into the woods in my backyard and do the same.
While I’m sure I read it earlier, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned to appreciate the open-ended beauty of the last Calvin and Hobbes comic, which features the titular duo sledding off into a snowy white wilderness, suggesting that, even though the strip has ended, Calvin and Hobbes’ adventures, and their friendship, endure.
And when I became a dad, I remember being deeply moved by a wordless comic strip with Calvin’s dad, who decides to put his work aside to go play with his kid in the snow.
On occasion, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes has gotten me thinking about the nature of life itself, particularly in the thoughtful philosophical panels where Calvin and Hobbes are engaged in some deep conversation about the nature of existence. There are quite a lot of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips like this, so I’m going to make an attempt here to find the very best quote from Calvin and Hobbes about the meaning of life.
Calvin and Hobbes on the meaning of life
My initial instinct was to turn to the “Baby Raccoon Story.” Back in March, 1987, Watterson crafted a touching series of comic strips lasting two weeks where Calvin finds an injured baby raccoon. His parents take it in and hope for the best, but the next morning, Calvin is told that the raccoon has died. Calvin wrestles with those feelings and the scariness of death.
The series is probably the most emotional the comic strip ever got, and Calvin says a number of really poignant things in it, like when he’s laying in bed with Hobbes and he says “You know, Hobbes, I can’t figure out this death stuff. Why did that little raccoon have to die? He didn’t do anything wrong. He was just little! What’s the point of putting him here and taking him back so soon?”
But that quote, along with Calvin’s other sad, thoughtful lines in the story, are more about death than life, and it’s more about the questions Calvin is asking as opposed to any significant answer being given. So I continued to dig and found a number of good options.
”What if you find someone you can talk to while you eat apples on a bright fall morning?” is a good one that basically says, “All you need in life is one really good friend,” although you kind of need the rest of the strip to understand its context. Then there’s this one, from a comic where Calvin and Hobbes are stargazing: “If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’d bet they’d live a lot differently.” It’s a really thoughtful quote, but in my digging, I think I found one even better.
It comes from a 1992 Sunday comic where Calvin wonders why humans have evolved to have a sense of humor. He says to Hobbes, “When you think about it, it’s weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it’s funny. Don’t you think it’s odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?”
In response, this is what Hobbes says:
“I suppose if we couldn’t laugh at things that don’t make sense, we couldn’t react to a lot of life.”
Now that’s the kind of quote that will make you really think about it. It’s not too sad or too optimistic, it just addresses the nature of life’s many absurdities, which is why it’s all the more perfect that the quote comes from a stuffed tiger.
