At this point, I can hear the clanking and wheezing of the machinery of my PhD in English literature as it is roused into a state of sluggish animation.
“Do you know what a metaphor is?” I ask.
My son turns his face slightly toward the wall and literally tightens his lips, as he tends to do rather than admit to not knowing something. I have lately noticed in him the presence of intellectual vanity, and although I know it’s not a particularly likable characteristic in people generally, I can’t help finding it adorable in him, if occasionally frustrating. (“I know that!” he’ll say crossly when told a thing he already knew, and occasionally a thing he didn’t.)
To the best of my ability, I explain to him what a metaphor is, though I’m not sure he’s really grasped it.
“So maybe a Thneed is basically anything we don’t actually need,” I say, “but really want anyway.”
“Like what?” he says.
“Like maybe Lego Minifigures?” I suggest.
“No,” he says. “Minifigures aren’t Thneeds!”
He’s riled now, leveraging against my shoulder to hoist himself upright in bed, and I’m wondering whether this discussion might ultimately be damaging to the larger objective of the bedtime story, which is, in theory at least, to wind him down for sleep.
“Aren’t they?” I counter suavely, and more or less against my better judgment. For the last few months, my son had been very into Lego Minifigures. These were packaged in such a way that you never knew which figure you were going to get until you had bought and opened it, and so the more of them you bought, the more likely it became that the packet you’d just purchased would contain a Minifigure you already owned—a guy in a banana suit, a Lego Batman in a pink tutu, a zombie in business attire—thereby making the acquisition completely superfluous. Paradoxically, though, because the Minifigures came in limited edition series, an element of completism came into play, and the closer he got to having the full complement of a particular series, the more determined he became to get there, even if it meant the acquisition of duplicates or triplicates of particular figures. (“Ugh, the hotdog suit guy again!”) On some level, he understood—because his mother and I had explained it to him—that this was a cynical marketing ploy on the part of the Lego corporation, but this understanding did nothing to dampen his appetite for further acquisitions. There was, at one point, a guy on staff in the toy shop we frequented who had an uncanny ability to divine which figure a package contained by means of lengthy and detailed manual palpation, but he eventually moved on—hopefully not because he was fired for using his God-given gift for divination to help customers like ourselves hack the Lego Minifigure system.
Offended by the implication that Lego Minifigures might be categorized as Thneeds, my son then delivered a shamelessly low blow by suggesting that coffee was a Thneed.
“I don’t think coffee counts as a Thneed,” I said.
“But you don’t need coffee,” he said.
“Well, yeah,” I said, “nobody needs coffee, but it actually has a lot of health benefits.”
“What’s benefits?”
“A benefit is a thing that’s helpful. A good thing.”
“But you have too much of a good thing. You’re only allowed”—and here he paused to calculate, more or less arbitrarily, how many cups of coffee I was to be permitted—“two cups of coffee a week.”
“A week?”
“Four cups,” he conceded.
“I thought I was allowed two cups per day.”
“Four a week.”
This was an ongoing argument, one that in truth I greatly enjoyed. Somehow he had sensed, in my admittedly overeager coffee consumption, a fast track to the moral high ground, a means by which he could legitimately critique me for the kind of overindulgence (in his case, chocolate and cakes and so on) he felt I unfairly chided him for.
It was agreed, eventually, that anything beyond two cups of coffee per day was to be considered a Thneed. He then suggested that books might also be considered Thneeds. For all that I received this as an outrageous claim, and an even lower blow than the coffee suggestion, it wasn’t entirely out of left field. Two or three mornings most weeks, a package would arrive at the door of our house, and my son would make an elaborate show of exasperation at my receipt of yet another book. “More books? Too much of a good thing, Dada!”
“I really don’t think we can say books are Thneeds,” I said. “In that case am I a Thneed-maker? Is Dr. Seuss himself in the business of making Thneeds?”
He responded how he always responded when he knew I had him cornered in an argument, which was the same way he tended to respond when I’d made a joke that he knew to be a good one but was unwilling to grant me the satisfaction of laughing at: he groaned and shook his head. “Ach!” he said, and pursed his lips in an effort not to smile, and he gave me one of his “hard stares,” a technique he’d picked up from the Paddington books. Returning a hard stare of my own, I thereby wordlessly initiated, via agreed protocol, a staring match. This was among my favorite games to play with my son, because it provided a useful pretext for gazing at leisure into his eyes, for a kind of intense perusal—leading to an almost unbearable refulgence of tenderness—for which in the ordinary run of things I pretty much never had occasion.
* * *
—
As fun as it is to read The Lorax to a child, it is also a sorrowful ritual. Because even though the child may laugh at the Lorax as he glances sadly backward at the Once-ler and lifts himself into the air by the seat of his pants—and even though you may laugh with him—you can’t ignore the story you are ultimately telling him. The last Truffula tree is gone, and the Thneed factory has been shuttered, and nature itself is in its death throes. You are telling the story of the world he has been born into, and his likely future in it.
And then there is the ending, with its terrible gesture of hope. The Once-ler, in the book’s final lines, returns to addressing his interlocutor, the little boy who stands for the child being read to, who stands for my son. He speaks of a small pile of rocks near the abandoned factory, whose large frontal stone is mysteriously engraved with the word “UNLESS.” The Once-ler has long puzzled over the meaning of that word, but now that his interlocutor—now that my son—is here, he says, “the word of the Lorax” is no longer so mysterious. “UNLESS someone like you / cares a whole awful lot, / nothing is going to get better. / It’s not.”
The Once-ler throws something from the high window of his tower, instructing the child to catch it as it falls. It’s a Truffula seed, he says, the very last one in existence. He instructs the child to plant it, and water it, and make sure that it gets clean air, and to grow from it an entire forest of Truffula trees. And perhaps then, he says, the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.