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I read it several times as kid… as an adult it’s hard for me to ascribe any one single meaning to it, but I have always found it so achingly sad
I haven't read it, but this fragment of the last paragraph of the article resonates with your sentiment...
'...the greatest works of children’s literature have dealt in “the sadness which is inseparable from life, which has to do with growth and change and impermanence, and with the very essence of beauty.”'
in a similar vein, i find it basically impossible to listen to puff the magic dragon without breaking down a little.
This song was played by my kindergarten teacher at nap time and thus when I hear it, I still want to take a nap!
I only read it as an adult and was also struck by its sadness. I appreciate how it touches on fundamental themes - sacrifice, love, growing up, dying, all in one short story. For me it is also the feeling of nostalgia, having a toy like the rabbit when I was little. It’s probably what helps many people connect with the story, having a favorite toy and then “abandoning” it growing up.
Why? It has a happy ending.
The subtlety of this happy ending says many things.
Literally, it means that being sacrificed upon a pyre is a transcendence.
Figuratively, it requires change, from one form to another.
Change in life is never easy.
I'm not sure if you're trolling or if you genuinely don't understand reading fiction. In case of the latter consider this:
Imagine traveling to a destination. The way is fraught and perilous, but you reach your goal- a blissful paradise. Would you say that the whole experience was happy?
It's the same with literature: it's about the journey, not the destination.
All's well that ends well - William Shakespeare. I'm not trolling. I literally believe that during a person's life, absolutely nothing matters except the final state at death. No matter what happens to him in the intervening time, if the end is good, it's all good. And I believe this with 100% no wiggle room.
I believe you believe what you wrote, and I believe you are not trolling. I also believe your ideas are 100% false.
Life is far too valuable to be defined in a single moment. And for many people, this single moment is not even a conscious one, they could be sleeping, or in a hospital bed, or it would happen too fast for them to notice. So it is also something they never experience.
Life is every moment we spent with our loved ones, and the experiences we leave behind. Every interaction matters, a single experience may matter more for some people than for others, and these experiences will stay in the memories of these others when we are gone. So we should strive to live the best of these experiences.
I also believe in your 'no wiggle room' attitude. So this comment is not really for you. It is for anyone else who reads your comment in the future, so they can also see there's strong disagreement with your comment and all its ideas.
The end is always death. That is neither good nor bad, but simply final death. So to me what matters is all the life before and not just the moments before fading out.
*"end is good" meaning "he is all right && he didn't harm anybody else in the process".
To look at an extreme example, lifetime spent under daily torture and imprisonment with a last minute redemption and freedom just before dying of old age would be a life well lived?
I think the velveteen rabbit also reflects how we each want to be loved. Though we will steadily fall apart with age, have our shine scraped away by the world, someone will still find us to be beautiful and treasured, not in spite of these things but because of them.
JK Rowling has actually tried to write a novel around similar themes called “Christmas Pig” and to be fair, it is a fun read as a bed time story for kids but doesn’t hit quite as hard as the Velveteen rabbit.
I myself have scavenged the source code of my predecessors, both alive and dead, that do things that I cannot understand, to make new systems that control our business.
I don't think that there is any way that I could have loved them more but by giving them this new life, and letting them live again in the needs of my job. This is "technical debt."
I do miss them.
I live alone. That is the best love that I'll ever know.
I have generally found that the best children's content all holds up amazingly well when viewed from an adult perspective. Think most Pixar films, Harry Potter, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Little Prince, His Dark Materials, Roald Dahl and so much more. Great authors simplify complex adult themes for children, but never forgo them.
Raising a simple observation: the distinction between 'children's content' and 'adult content' is a helpful fiction without a boundary. Children's content is really stories about how people should behave, or what situations might arise that they will need to deal with and stories for adults are much the same. Adults aren't more sophisticated than a teenager, they just have better impulse control (which isn't really a factor in consuming stories) and experience (which means they reject some poorly-told stories as impractical but doesn't come in to play with great storytelling).
I'm not sure what kind of life you've lived, or how old you are; but stating that
> Adults aren't more sophisticated than a teenager, they just have better impulse control
is reductionist and absurd.
Some experiences are only available to adulthood. Some experiences take decades to transpire; some experiences need decades to pass after their conclusion before they can be fully understood, contextualized, and woven into one's self.
FWIW, the real quote you are replying to should be “better impulse control and experience”, so not quite as reductionist as you suggest.
> Think most Pixar films
This becomes less and less true as they pump out more movies. They clearly have peaked a long time ago now.
I know this is subjective, but I'm not sure I agree. Some of the later Pixar films seem to have plenty of adult themes/moments to me. "Coco" (2017), "Soul" (2020) and "Luca" (2021) have things that strongly resonate with me as an adult, while obviously having appeal to kids. "Turning Red" in contrast feels pretty childish, but that's the exception. (Haven't watched Lightyear as the subject doesn't interest me).
I agree about meaning but I feel they have become way less artistic/ subtle about the meaning. Sometimes painfully blunt…
That is because you are judging it as adult. Your real interest is in whether it is best from your adult perspective and also kids like it.
I'll add the film "The Waterhorse" which was a favorite of mine and my son at the time (7 or 8 y old).
Velveteen Rabbit has been a favorite for the San Francisco-based ODC Dance company for a very long time. With some connection to that community, it is a difficult road to stable adulthood from the mix of talented, ambitious, flawed, selfish and occasionally fallen alumnae in that crowd. There is no explaining the emotional intensity of hearts on fire, nor the enduring charms of simple childhood play deep within.
There's a book for children in Poland that really resonated with me when I was 4 or so, Zajączek z rozbitego lusterka:
http://www.nostalgia.pl/zajaczek-z-rozbitego-lusterka
Seems it left an impression on others as well and also features a rabbit of sorts.
Thestory from Poland which really stood out to me: The Witcher :-)
This is a better essay on The Velveteen Rabbit: https://thelampmagazine.com/2022/10/28/gods-toys/
I first encoutered this story well into adulthood, and could never quite articulate why it struck such a chord in me (and clearly, many others).
Later in life, after becoming familiar with the work of Joseph Campbell (Hero with a Thousand Faces) and Jordan Peterson (c.f. his lectures that unpack Pinnochio, The Lion King and his Biblical series), I began to understand the underlying elements in the story that make it reach so deep into our psyches.
Theme 1: pure love as a purifying crucible. Love as the ultimate goal and the ultimate sacrifice. The boy loves the rabbit, but it goes from being new and shiny to being torn and ragged. But love makes it "real". In that sense it is not a sacrifice, but the achievement of a higher ideal.
Theme 2: rebirth and redemption. The Phoenix story. The rabbit is burnt, shedding everything but its purest essence. The tear symbolizes the remnants of attachments to its past self.
Yes. Very well put.
As one raised in evangelical Christianity, I always see in The Velveteen Rabbit the theme of Love as a means of sanctification through devotion to the ideal, come hell or high water - becoming "Real".
It works particularly well through that lense, as the deus ex machina at the end is exactly right for a Christian worldview, not a cheap trick to escape the hard reality.
In a similar vein, https://www.fatherly.com/play/the-house-at-pooh-corner-has-t...
That chapter always gets me, whether I read it or listen to it in an audiobook.
Russell Hoban "the mouse and his child"
Does anyone else find the typography on this website remarkably beautiful?
It's definitely nice. I've been trying to search for somewhere that sells fonts that can be used for web that aren't licensed by number of pageviews. I know there's free fonts, like Google Fonts, but I'm looking for something nicer that I can buy a reasonably priced site license for. For reference, the body copy on that site uses Miller Text, which would cost $4,000 for an unlimited pageview version. That would not even include the italicized version or multiple weights. Maybe I wouldn't need to worry about it for most projects, but I don't want a bill that can spike to $100s without notice based on however they calculate their pageviews.
Only a small selection of fonts, but ones I find really beautiful are designed by Matthew Butterick. They fit your requirements nicely. He also wrote some great books on typography.
Oh ya! I’ve seen his stuff before. Thanks for the reminder!
I still wish there were more sites/foundries with licenses like his, but helpful nonetheless!
Clearly a designer's job with good taste.
Mixing sans-serif and serif fonts can really work on webpages and it shows here.
I don’t think the typography on this site is particularly remarkable. Seems to be the browser default. Though, the orange header is interesting.
They do a pretty good job with it.
Love this article, and her story
I wonder if this quote from "Amy's Eyes" was a direct reference to "The Velveteen Rabbit":
> There is time enough to be real. And if it never happens, that can be all right, too.
Nearly all children’s literature is.
I've never read it.
this is such a depressing book
My wife and I had the Skin Horse’s Tale read at our wedding. I believe that we also made bookmarks with that text on it and left one at each place setting.