This [The Missing Piece Meets the Big O] is a funny, ephemeral little picture book, a bit like a 60-second National Film Board short caught on paper. Shel Silverstein has a great talent for anthropomorphizing basic geometric shapes. One thick black wavery line runs through the whole book and out of it grows the saddest triangle (“The missing piece sat alone waiting for someone to come along and take it somewhere”) and a bunch of incomplete circles of varying characters. They meet with the smile-while-your-heart-is-breaking humor of someone reciting a list of fleeting love affairs: “Some fit but could not roll. Others could roll but did not fit.”

The moral is that of geometry run through a 1960s wringer. The Big O is the most self-sufficient of shapes—self-contained, self-motivated and with the ability to appreciate and inspire such perfect wholeness in others. The Big O advises the missing piece, “Corners wear off and shapes change.” And the triangle, flopping and bumping, learns how to get from one point to the next. The Silverstein sermon reeks in a gentle way of the California-bred wisdom of enlightened self-interest: we all have to be able to roll on our own before we can roll together. Thank you, Lord.