Back in grade school, I could not fully understand Velveteen Rabbit.
I couldn't really grasp the core idea in "What it means to be real?" The concepts of "love" and "real" were too mature for my young, less imaginative mind then. It escaped me how these concepts translate in my life in school, home and play. It wasn't clear how these abstract concepts fuse with my experience, which was still very limited. These big ideas, to be sure, were simply beyond a ten-year old's imagination. At that time, the thesis and the story did not yet connect in my head.
I couldn't really grasp the core idea in "What it means to be real?" The concepts of "love" and "real" were too mature for my young, less imaginative mind then. It escaped me how these concepts translate in my life in school, home and play. It wasn't clear how these abstract concepts fuse with my experience, which was still very limited. These big ideas, to be sure, were simply beyond a ten-year old's imagination. At that time, the thesis and the story did not yet connect in my head.
Growing up, the life lessons made the ideas in Velveteen Rabbit no less slippery.
I thought the answer, which was written in the dialogue between the real bunny and the toy, was simple enough. But I also thought that the cliché too neatly tied up the kinks of a metaphor, which I suspected was far more than it appeared. I felt that the idea in the story mimicked the pop songs crooning about romantic love: love has the power to make things truly alive. These pop ideas are easy to enough to accept but somehow I knew they smooth out the rough maladies and many contradictions hiding under the hood.
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