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The Velveteen Rabbit was always more than a children’s book
- Flatcircle 4y agoLove this article, and her story
- mistrial9 4y agoVelveteen 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.
- dist1ll 4y agoDoes anyone else find the typography on this website remarkably beautiful?
- brailsafe 4y agoThey do a pretty good job with it.
- andyfleming 4y agoIt'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.
- V__ 4y agoOnly 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. [1] https://mbtype.com/ https://mbtype.com/
- andyfleming 4y agoOh 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!
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- keyle 4y agoClearly a designer's job with good taste. Mixing sans-serif and serif fonts can really work on webpages and it shows here.
- ianhawes 4y agoI don’t think the typography on this site is particularly remarkable. Seems to be the browser default. Though, the orange header is interesting.
- mjmsmith 4y agoIn a similar vein, https://www.fatherly.com/play/the-house-at-pooh-corner-has-the-best-ending-of-a-novel-ever https://www.fatherly.com/play/the-house-at-pooh-corner-has-t...
- BostonEnginerd 4y agoThat chapter always gets me, whether I read it or listen to it in an audiobook.
- chasil 4y agoI've never read it. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/11757 https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/11757
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- msla 4y agoI 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.
- mzs 4y agoThere'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 http://www.nostalgia.pl/zajaczek-z-rozbitego-lusterka Seems it left an impression on others as well and also features a rabbit of sorts.
- samstave 4y agoThestory from Poland which really stood out to me: The Witcher :-)
- hprotagonist 4y agoNearly all children’s literature is.
- skrtskrt 4y agoI 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
- hprotagonist 4y agoin a similar vein, i find it basically impossible to listen to puff the magic dragon without breaking down a little.
- dano 4y agoThis song was played by my kindergarten teacher at nap time and thus when I hear it, I still want to take a nap!
- canadianfella 4y ago
- chasil 4y agoI 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.”'
- Konohamaru 4y agoWhy? It has a happy ending.
- jonathanlb 4y agoI'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.
- paxys 4y agoI 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.
- ekianjo 4y ago> 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.
- the_af 4y agoI 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).
- duxup 4y agoI agree about meaning but I feel they have become way less artistic/ subtle about the meaning. Sometimes painfully blunt…
- blobbers 4y agoPainfully blunt what a nice way to describe it!!! Yes, when the meanings are so curved you almost miss their reflection… but don’t. And that is what makes the story so beautiful!
- the_af 4y agoAgain, this is subjective, but I found "Luca" beautiful and poetic. Some of the dreamlike sequences about the scooter brought tears to my eyes.
- gandalfgeek 4y agoI 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.
- NateEag 4y agoYes. 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.
- blobbers 4y agoI 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.
- chasil 4y agoI 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.
- simsspoons 4y agothis is such a depressing book
- earthboundkid 4y agoThis is a better essay on The Velveteen Rabbit: https://thelampmagazine.com/2022/10/28/gods-toys/ https://thelampmagazine.com/2022/10/28/gods-toys/
- halostatue 4y agoMy 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.
- ggm 4y agoRussell Hoban "the mouse and his child" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_and_His_Child https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_and_His_Child