>> I'm Don Pease [phonetic], and I'm speaking
in the Theodor Geisel Room
of the Dartmouth Baker-Berry Library, a room that's described
as an imaginative resource for Dartmouth students.
And I'm here to talk about the remake of one
of Doctor Seuss' most significant children's books,
The Lorax.
In order to give you some sense of the connection
between the significance of that book and the room
in which I'm talking about it, let me just gesture
to give you a sense of the place this site occupies.
It's about 33 degrees across from the Rollins Chapel,
where Theodor Geisel matriculated
in a convocation September of 1921.
It's about 40 degrees from the Wilson Hall,
which was the library at Dartmouth at the time
that Ted Geisel read books and wrote, and created cartoons
when he wasn't reading the books he should have been reading,
in spaces not unlike this space, and the imaginative resources
that would be preserved for posterity in the images
that lined these walls, and that hold special places
in the imaginations of every one of you who had Doctor Seuss read
to you as children, and who in turn -- as that heritage,
it's a deep, deep human heritage --
read those stories to your children as well.
We're also across the way from Toplip [phonetic] Hall,
where Ted Geisel was a resident, 416.
And over another few blocks is Sigma Ep Fraternity,
where Ted Geisel was a brother.
I want to give you some sense of the significance
of those locations, by also giving you the time
in which this video's getting recorded.
We're the day after winter carnival,
and we're the day before Valentine's Day.
And in a sense, The Lorax is a book
about the borderline separating what happens
when human beings begin to impersonate Old Man Winter,
and turn the springtime environment into something
that looks like the surface of the moon, and what happens
when an imagination that is as vital and as childlike
as Ted Geisel's turns the desire
to recover the spring that's been appropriated by winter back
into the pure identic imagination
of the green world he called Dartmouth,
by constructing a carnival --
a winter carnival of the imagination called The Lorax.
The Lorax has characters --
the Once-ler and The Lorax himself --
who could have been subjects of winter carnival sculpture.
If you think about the character of The Lorax,
he looks like a miniaturized version of Paul Bunyan,
who got his reputation for cutting down forests.
But The Lorax is about the size of a munchkin,
who appears in the moment of that text in which the dreary,
almost grey, black and white captions, prior to the discovery
of the Truffula trees, give way to the pure linen-color
of the redeemed Eden that the Onceler and we, together,
encounter when The Lorax needs to speak for the trees.
In suggesting that The Lorax is about the transition from winter
to spring, and about the ways
in which the human imagination has a responsibility
to sustain what could be called the permanent springtime
of human existence by recovering the childlike imagination
of the boy who must plant the last of the Truffula seeds
in order to bring The Lorax back,
you have to understand the significance of that event --
the lived biography of Ted Geisel.
When Ted Geisel wrote The Lorax, he was going
through a profound depressing moment in his life.
His wife of more than 35 years, Helen, died three years earlier,
and he felt blocked by a winter of the imagination.
And so Audrey, who recovered his spirits
and redeemed his imagination, suggested they travel to Africa
in order to get away from what he felt was the false need
constructed by his publishers in order
to exploit the imaginative resources
of Doctor Seuss' treasure house of figures.
When he traveled to Kenya, and saw a herd
of elephants cross a mountain, he turned to Audrey
and said I felt as if the logjam had been completely removed,
and the flood of my imagination returned.
In a sense, The Lorax is about, in its biographical context,
the transformation of winter
into the obligation to recover spring.
The Lorax has also a Dartmouth living and lived context.
When Ted Geisel traveled to Hanover, New Hampshire
from Springfield, Massachusetts in September of 1921,
it was after the catastrophe of the first world war had resulted
in anti-German prejudice in the Springfield community.
And it had also resulted in prohibition,
which removed Geisel, who was the scion of Kalmbach
and Geisel Brewery, one of the most successful in all
of the northeast -- his friends would call it Come Back
and Guzzle Brewery.
It meant that that source
of resourceful need had itself been devastated.
When he came to Dartmouth, he needed a new family,
and he needed to have the child
who had been abruptly cut off restored, by teachers
and friends, and a new family in a green world
that would allow the winter that had settled on Springfield
to be transformed into the green world of the imagination
that Dartmouth both redeemed, and sustained.
One of the transfer characters, or creatures, in The Lorax
from Geisel's Dartmouth experience,
the Barbaloot-like bears in that they wear Barbaloot suits.
They're creatures of the imagination
who like the humming fish and the swami swams --
swans travel from the place of the Truffula trees,
when everything is devastated
by what could be called ecological winter,
as during wintertime bears and fish, and birds also tend
to disappear from the visible habitat, and the environs
of Hanover, New Hampshire.
If we imagine the unfinished work of the imagination
to inhabit a border at the line between winter and spring,
it's easy to imagine a Dartmouth son of Doctor Seuss,
Chris Meledandri, class of 1981, taking up that borderland site,
and reanimating the voices of The Lorax
to take the profound imagination of Doctor Seuss writing
in the opening years of the environmental movement
in the 1970s, and reimagine
that for the environmentally savvy generations of students
and adults in the 21st century.
In order to do justice to both the vital unfinished imagination
of the endless springtime called Doctor Seuss' Lorax,
Chris Meledandri out of the character Audrey,
and rename the protagonist Ted, in order to let the audience
for the 21st century film experience the true love story
at the heart of the relation between winter and spring.
It's the deepest romance that the earth has to offer.
As you watch that movie, have the sense
of the deep Dartmouth past, and have the sense
of the profound global future
that that Dartmouth unconscious made possible
for Ted Geisel [inaudible].
The Lorax is a voice crying out the wilderness
for the transformation of a landscape that's been turned
into a desolate winter.
And as you discuss the film with one another, get a vivid sense
of the way in which a Dartmouth son of Doctor Seuss,
Chris Meledandri, has taken the seed called The Lorax,
and planted it in a film that draws out a whole garden
of inspired transmutations of Doctor Seuss' wonderful book.