Some days I’d like to live in the world of Peanuts, along with Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Lucy. In one of those nice strips invented by Schultz where, between a drama and a dream, life flows with its serenity and a carefree linearity.
The beauty of everything that happens in those little colored panels is that all the “crooked” things find their place in the plot of the story: whether it’s a quarrel, an adventure, a trip to the campsite or a baseball game, Charlie Brown & co. they always find themselves in a world that follows its own order, its own internal consistency and reasonableness. Every variation, every jolt or unexpected is “reabsorbed” in the overall design, integrated into the scheme of things. Nothing is so “strange” or unusual or painful that it cannot be accommodated in those four squares that tell the story. In the end, there is always the possibility of a redemption, of a salvation, of a solution to what appears, at first sight, to be so intolerable or incompatible.
I think that after all Snoopy and his friends fascinate us for this too: whatever happens to the protagonists, there is always the opportunity to be told, to be hosted in a narrative that, in one way or another, can make sense and reasonableness of experience.
In real life, alas, things often go very differently. Sometimes it happens that you have to digest facts that stun you for their violence or unpredictability; you have to metabolize news and events that upset you, destabilize you and upset you with such energy that you struggle to assign a distant sense or a vague sense of meaning to what happened.
In everyday life that “narratability” (which is synonymous with meaning) that animates the pages of the Peanutes seems to disappear to make room for what is incomprehensible, confused, impenetrable, elusive and often painful.
It is precisely in these moments that the enigmatic nature of life knocks on our door and asks to be welcomed as an unwelcome and unpleasant guest.
Life Blog 