Seeking gray areas and uncomfortable paradoxes

Unlikely friendships in Amos and Boris

Oh hi!

She casually says as she waves to you like your mom on your first day of school.

I have what I’ve been told is “a tendency to care too much.” That used to bother me. A lot. But now I understand it better.

Caring about things has given me so many wonderful gifts. I connect with people well. I’m passionate about a lot of things. I’m intuitive and empathetic and understand my heart.

Caring so much also has challenges. I worry about people a lot. I take on too much and get drained easily. I struggle to prioritize my own well being. Etc.

For a few years now, I’ve been actively exploring gray areas. The positive sides of “bad” things and the negative sides of “good” things. One thing I used to be 100% sure about was: APATHY = BAD.

I can see why I thought it. It’s good to engage in life, to feel excited about something, to care. By that point I had seen many people (and their relationships) wither away in apathy. I learned that when we let fear hold us back from caring about things, we lose those things and limit our emotional capacity. Which is true.

But there’s always room for more truth. Often a truth that contradicts the other truth you worked so hard to discover. Oh boy.

Where did I discover this new truth? The corporate world, of course. At first this world ate me alive. But luckily I met some wise people along the way who taught me a necessary survival strategy: apathy.

Here’s the breakdown: If you don’t care as much, you won’t feel so stressed or frustrated or drained by all the annoying things that are naturally part of a corporate job (weird power struggles, mediocre managers, toxic dynamics, etc.) If you don’t feel so stressed or frustrated or drained, you can use all that leftover energy to enjoy and care about YOUR ACTUAL LIFE instead.

So even though it contradicted everything I knew, I tried it because I was miserable. It took a long time for me to care even a tiny bit less. But when I did, I discovered apathy isn’t always about not caring about things or not trying or fear. It was also about redirecting my energy to the things I cared about the most. I could still do a great job without giving everything I had to the job. Seeing apathy as a smart strategy completely rocked my world.

Steig explored gray areas like these all the time in his books. And yet the more I read about his life, the more I learn that he was actually a bit of a black-and-white thinker. His daughter Maggie said, “Like a kid, Bill saw things in black and white–you were a good guy or a bad guy, and there was nothing in between.” His wife Jeanne also confirmed this. What? This is the guy who made Rotten Island and Shrek where the “bad guys” were actually the heroes of the story. This is the guy who made Doctor De Soto with a complicated “bad guy” fox who felt guilty about his own instincts to eat mice.

For me, stories provide a safe space to explore gray areas. Stories help me find the right questions which are often more important than the right answers. With the right question, I can explore more than one truth. Apathy is bad. Apathy is good. True and true.

I wonder if stories offered a similar space for Steig.

In this week’s study, we’ll see the positive sides of wonder. But then wonder causes a life-threatening situation for the main character. Gray area here we come!

(Note: If you don’t want spoilers, watch the read aloud of AMOS AND BORIS here. If you are impatient like me, you may want to watch it in double speed.)

To read a text-only version of this video, go to the P.S. section at the very bottom of this post.

What are your thoughts on apathy, wonder, or gray areas? And do you have any theories on this line: “Amos, standing on the head of one of the elephants, yelled instructions, but no one heard him”?

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Next week, I’m going to share with you the final piece of our William Steig study. We’ll go over some facts about his life, things other creators have said about him and his work, and some final thoughts about the surprising ways this intense study of over 40(!) of his books impacted me. I hope you’ll join me AT THE KID TABLE.

Your-wondering-her-way-into-paradoxes-that-hopefully-don’t-require-near-death-experiences friend,

Rachel

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P.S. Here is the text-only version of the William Steig study part IV video.

Amos and Boris

The last book I want to dive into for our William Steig study is called AMOS AND BORIS. Amos is a mouse who dreams of adventures across the sea. He builds a boat, sets out, and, through some life-threatening situations, forms a deep friendship with a whale named Boris. 

You can hear the setting of the sea in Steig’s lyrical language: “He loved to hear the surf sounds–the bursting breakers, the backwashes with rolling pebbles.” Steig builds his characters in the same way. When Amos loads his boat, the first thing he packs is “cheese.” Then he packs some practical things and “various other necessities such as bandages and iodine, a yo-yo and playing cards.” There’s something about the yo-yo and playing cards that makes this character come alive for me. Steig uses specificity to establish Amos as a complicated character. For example, rather than write “he set sail one day,” Steig said, “on the sixth of September,” indicating Amos made a deliberate decision. He is not a character full of wonder who acts rashly like we might expect. And yet he’s going out alone without any sailing skills other than what he read in a book. The conflict between his rationality and wonder gives this story a compelling start. 

Despite his meticulous planning, the ocean still surprises him. At first it is only sea sickness which he overcomes: “And Amos, after one miserable day of seasickness, proved to be a natural sailor, very well suited to the ship.” I feel like this is Steig’s way of foreshadowing worse things to come while also reassuring us it is going to be okay. 

When trouble comes to a ship, it is almost always a storm. But Steig takes a different route. The very thing that we love about our main character from the first page – his wonder – is the very thing that causes his problem. “One night, in a phosphorescent sea, he marveled at the sight of some whales spouting luminous water; and later, lying on the deck of his boat gazing at the immense starry sky, the tiny mouse Amos, a little speck of a living thing in the vast living universe, felt thoroughly akin to it all. Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea.” His trouble is completely rooted in character which makes it even more powerful. What was originally a strength is now explored as a weakness.

In Amos’s moment of weakness, we see he needs something in his life. Actually someone: Boris, a friendly whale who saves his life. And it turns out that Boris needs Amos too. Boris can’t experience the land, and Amos can’t experience the sea, so they experience it through each other. I find it interesting that at first Amos is seeking wonder. But when he meets Boris, he becomes the source of wonder for someone else. We also see this circular structure after Boris saves Amos from death when Amos has the chance to save Boris. These two characters reflect each other like a mirror which is a great way to explore the similarities and differences between them and how those impact their friendship. 

For a lot of the book, Amos and Boris get along. They learn from one another. They respect one another. But there is a moment I appreciate so much when “all of a sudden [Amos] was in the water again, wide awake, spluttering and splashing about! Boris had forgotten for a moment that he had a passenger on his back and had sounded. When he realized his mistake, he surfaced so quickly that Amos was sent somersaulting, tail over whiskers, high into the air. Hitting the water hurt. Crazy with rage, Amos screamed and punched at Boris until he remembered he owed his life to the whale and quietly climbed on his back. From then on, whenever Boris wanted to sound, he warned Amos in advance and got his okay, and whenever he sounded, Amos took a swim.” Real friendships have bumps like this and I think what actually forms the strongest bonds are how we work through those bumps–when who we are conflicts with who someone else is. I appreciate that Steig takes the space in a picture book of limited space to show us this moment.

If you are into friendship stories that feel both earnest and complex, I definitely recommend reading this one. And while you’re at it, will you help me figure out a piece of the puzzle I don’t understand yet? It’s at the end when Amos has gotten a few elephants to help save Boris. The narrator says, “Amos, standing on the head of one of the elephants, yelled instructions, but no one heard him.” I feel the importance of this line, but I don’t quite understand it yet. Any ideas? There are no wrong answers so feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

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