For those who don't recognize the name, William Steig was a wildly popular New Yorker cartoonist in its heyday in the 1930s. He eventually left the magazine because they were lukewarm about a new style he developed which was influenced by Picasso. After leaving he went on to develop two or three additional new styles, all good. Think about that the next time you find yourself agonizing over the perfection of just one new approach.
Anyway, Steig had to pioneer new techniques because what he had to say was constantly evolving. The cartoons here are from his middle period when he was obsessed with the problems brought on by middle age.
Then comes middle age, and everything you do seems like a grotesque caricature of what you used to do. Observations like this used to be reserved for long, wordy literary novels, but Steig put them into one panel cartoons. That's what I call economy! It's tempting to conclude that Steig almost single-handedly made a certain kind of long-winded novel obsolete.
People don't engage in swordfights or horse races in Steig cartoons. His work is all about the little things of life. What he seems to be getting at is that we're all misled into believing that our lives are defined by the highlights. We think the important events are things like the big fight we had with a schoolyard bully or the day we met our lover, the day we had our first child, etc. Actually, for Steig, those aren't the most important events at all.
What's really important...I'm positing on his behalf...are the daily low profile events that nobody ever talks about. What's important are facts like, the fact that pizza tastes good, that your wife and neighbors can at least tolerate you, that the world is interesting, that family arguments about little things are inevitable, that your car doesn't break down too often, and that your family concedes the fact that the ratty old easy chair is yours and not the dog's.
In other words, the millions of events between the highlights are what life is really about. The handful of big super events are just punctuation.
I don't know about you, but that strikes me as profound. If life is about the little things, shouldn't we cultivate a strategy to maximize our enjoyment of them? That means being good at our job, being charming, being capable of having fun, cultivating self-discipline, being analytical....geez, it would be a long list.
That's really all I have to say, but I can't help but throw another couple of cartoons in, even though they (below) don't fit my commentary.
