Adam Blatner

Recently I saw this “Peanuts” comic strip about Charlie Brown encountering Linus in the pumpkin patch as the latter awaits the arrival of the “Great Pumpkin.”

What struck me about this is the reminder that even surprisingly precocious and intelligent people can have weird notions. For example, Linus, whose character I played in the 2010 production of our local community theatre’s production of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” is a precocious boy who, aside from his attachment to his blanket, has fixated on the myth of the “Great Pumpkin.”

Spiritual development seems especially vulnerable to nuance, to subtle interpretation variances regarding the nature of God, soul, their relationship, what it’s all about, and so forth. This may be more flagrant as it expresses itself in the variety of myths (e.g., the take-off on Santa Claus as embodied in Linus’ “Great Pumpkin”)—which, also speaks to the special richness of imagery and fantasy that gets generated at Halloween—perhaps even more than at Christmas! And of course, as I see it, this is what the late Charles Schulz was getting at: To a child, the factual historical antecedents are not important: What counts is the gestalt, the gut impression. It seems right that on a major occasion, Christmas, Easter (Bunny), … someone should be buying presents for children! It just stands to reason (or seems to) that this is one of the givens of reality—to a childish (egocentric, narcissistically entitle) mind that  also extends the child-centered ethos of the late 20th century in the USA.

This cartoon also speaks to the way I have attempted on many occasions to reason out the nature of reality—i.e., philosophy—with reasonable people, only to find that they (or I, myself) may be biased at such deep levels that no rapprochement has been possible. I am inclined to think that while we may share more or less a number of similar qualities, we also differ in uncountable ways, some of them being rather particular and perhaps peculiar. (More about the mystery of mythmaking in another blog.)