Embracing Unknowing
The creator of Calvin & Hobbes has written a much darker book–but the unknown doesn’t have to bring us only to terror or indifference. There is another way.
Review by Ali Holcomb
We humans have never been very comfortable with what we do not know. Nowadays we like a mystery story, because though we read in suspense for chapter after chapter, we are satisfied in the end when all is revealed–but the world around us has never been quite as simple as an Agatha Christie novel. Bill Watterson’s new, odd little book, The Mysteries, brings us face to face with our discomfort with the unknown–in a way that perhaps will not satisfy the reader.
Now, writing a review on a book by Bill Watterson without referencing Calvin & Hobbes is beyond my capability. I grew up on Calvin and & Hobbes, and I love the comic to this day. My husband and I bonded over a shared love of Calvin & Hobbes, realizing that between the two of us we own the whole collection of the comics (with multiple doubles). My sister made me a stuffed Hobbes for my birthday that sits by our massive collection. I could be First Tiger for the Calvin & Hobbes Fan Club.
Calvin & Hobbes has been an inspiration for much of my adulthood as well as childhood, and Watterson’s commencement address to Kenyon College has also meant a lot to me for many years. My sister sent it to me during the turmoil of my senior year of college, as I agonized over what on earth I would do after graduation. (How does one find a job?) If you have not read it, I urge you to do so. Watterson challenges us to combat many of the pitfalls that are so easy to fall into in “the real world” (like smugness when we think we’ve “arrived”) and urges us instead to allow ourselves to chase beauty, think about why we work, and enjoy the detours and the view along the ride, since we never know exactly where we will end up. At first it was funny reading these insightful and frankly inspiring words from the creator of my favorite comic–but looking back, I realized this depth had always been there in the comic. So when I heard Watterson was writing a book, a “fable for adults,” I was ecstatic.
The people are surprised by the sheer ordinariness of his catch, and they go about their lives, ceasing to fear the Mysteries.
But reading the premise of The Mysteries and seeing the cover image, I knew this book wasn’t going to feature the gleefulness of Calvin & Hobbes–and I will confess I missed the levity. The pictures in this book are eerie; only in black and white. The tale begins with a medieval-reminiscent kingdom, complete with weathered peasants and a pompous-looking king. They all fear the Mysteries that live in the woods: they build walls against them, but still things happen with no explanation. The King orders his Knights to capture a Mystery, and though many Knights are lost, one finally does indeed capture a Mystery.
The result is anticlimactic in the extreme. The people are surprised by the sheer ordinariness of his catch, and they go about their lives, ceasing to fear the Mysteries. The book’s pictures slowly bring us into modern times, depicting the spread of the written word, the rise of newspapers and art galleries, and then planes and highways and people driving in traffic become the new pages. And all during this time the people grow less afraid. They cut down the forest; they expand across the land. But then the sky turns a dark color, animals migrate, storms grow persistent, and the people grow alarmed once more. But the Universe continues, and slowly the pictures zoom out from the storms on Earth to show the galaxy. The final lines read, “And the Mysteries lived happily ever after.”
In a video of a conversation about the creation of this tale between Watterson and his co-illustrator John Kascht, the pair describe The Mysteries as a Rorschach test of sorts: everyone can walk away understanding their book a little (or a lot) differently. Knowing Watterson’s heart for the environment and love of the earth (let us never forget Calvin and Hobbes temporarily escaping Earth when they thought Earth was being ruined), I read it thinking, “This is a book calling for us to be more green.” But perhaps I’m too jaded by politics if that was my first take, and maybe this is my sign that I should look to leave my field. I’m finding that I’m often too quick to look for a concrete political agenda rather than allowing for something to carry meaning that’s a little larger or more abstract.
The Mysteries of our galaxy will persist, whether we acknowledge them or not
So I paused on it for a bit. I recalled that another thing Watterson has always done is challenge his readers to think beyond ourselves. Six-year-old Calvin’s myopia was always Watterson holding up a mirror for those of us brave enough to look into our own eyes–like when Calvin yells at the night sky, “I’M SIGNIFICANT” then mutters, “screamed the dust speck.” Watterson also scattered markers for his own less frivolous interests throughout his comics for those paying attention, naming Calvin’s teacher after “Wormwood” in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Calvin himself after the theologian John Calvin, and Hobbes for the philosopher with a dim view of mankind. Armed with this knowledge, I took another look at The Mysteries.
I started this review by saying that humans are uncomfortable with the unknown. I know I hate to think about how 80 percent of our oceans are unknown and unmapped. While my husband, who loves space, loves to think about space exploration and all there is to learn in our great galaxy, I shrink from it and would rather embed myself in the comfort of our own dear little planet and not think too much about the great expanse of the universe. Which is to say, I’m like the townspeople and peasants in the tale: the Mysteries frighten me. But many in our day and age don’t like to think that there are still Mysteries unsolved to mankind; many people today believe that we’ve solved it all, or can solve it all, or are well on the way to solving it all. Madeleine L’Engle writes, “We have more knowledge than the human mind can cope with, and we can’t make it go away–and we don’t want it to go away.” That was the first temptation, after all: to have knowledge of good and evil, to be as God. We greedily devoured the fruit so we could know, and it has been a burden to bear ever since. Watterson, in this fable, seems to show two ways of approaching Mysteries: fearing them and cowering from them, or forgetting they exist and telling ourselves we have conquered them. This book is dark, and in it Watterson seems to offer only these two alternatives. The story ends on an ominous note: The Mysteries of our galaxy will persist, whether we acknowledge them or not.
But there is (at least) one other way. Even though I’m prone to fear, I pray for wonder. Can we learn to rest with the Mysteries’s existence? To be content with what we do not know? To allow another Hand than our own to be at the helm? We have mighty ships that can withstand seas in a way early explorers could never have imagined, but when standing on the beach recently, watching the massive waves crash, I was aware that there is still a power in nature that man can never control; I remembered what poets and philosophers alike have called the Sublime. When I keep my awe of all this unknown at the front of my mind, I lose my fear of it. I do not fully understand how the Rocky Mountains came to be, but looking up at them, I know they are beautiful, and that is enough. My own inner workings, too, are an utter mystery to me. I have been told the gas exchange that occurs in my lungs, moving oxygen to my blood and my heart and exhaling carbon dioxide, is one of the most complex exchanges in the body, and yet my body does it 12 to 18 times a minute. God willing, it will continue to do so, while I wake and sleep and wake again. There’s nothing I can do about any of that. And I am content.
Ali Holcomb is a newly minted military wife and still marvels at being walking distance to the ocean from her house in Virginia. She has written for Mere Orthodoxy and is a regular contributor at Mockingbird Theology, and just launched a Substack where she sorts through her latest “life thoughts.”
The Mysteries was published by Andrews McMeel Publishing on October 10, 2023. Fare Forward appreciates the provision of a copy for our reviewer. You can purchase a copy of your own from the publisher here.
