Winnie the Pooh
“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.
I think that this captures so much of the human condition.
THIS IS THE ONE I COULDN’T REMEMBER! I was just discussing the sonic one with my partner and was trying to remember this one!
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, chapter 10 is pretty rough, particularly this stark line:
“Slowly but surely, everybody in the house began to starve.”
I read the book to my daughter a few years back and I’d forgotten quite how bleak things are before all the fun stuff that people remember.
Roald Dahl did not fuck around. He grew up in one of those psychopathic early-20th-century British boarding schools, and then went to Africa once he graduated, and World War 2 broke out and he fought in Egypt and Greece.
He wrote children’s literature because kids tend to vibe with how his brain works, but he was not playing games. Read his adult short stories sometime.
Edit: From his autobiography, from early on in his time in Africa:
Suddenly, the voice of a man yelling in Swahili exploded into the quiet of the evening … He was yelling from somewhere behind the house. “Simba, bwana! Simba! Simba!”
Simba is Swahili for lion. All three of us leapt to our feet, and the next moment Mdisho came tearing round the corner of the house yelling at us in Swahili. “Come quick, bwana! Come quick! Come quick! A huge lion is eating the wife of the cook!”
That sounds pretty funny when you put it on paper back here in England, but to us, standing on a veranda in the middle of East Africa, it was not funny at all.
Robert Sanford flew into the house and came out again in five seconds flat holding a powerful rifle and ramming a cartridge into the breech. “Get those children indoors!” he shouted to his wife as he ran down off the veranda with me behind him.
"I like you as you are Exactly and precisely I think you turned out nicely And I like you as you are
I like you as you are Without a doubt or question Or even a suggestion Cause I like you as you are
I like your disposition Your facial composition And with your kind permission I’ll shout it to a star
I like you as you are I wouldn’t want to change you Or even rearrange you Not by far
I like you I-L-I-K-E-Y-O-U I like you, yes I do I like you, Y-O-U I like you, like you as you are"
- Mr. Rogers
There’s an argument to be made that Rocko’s Modern Life was not for children, but it aired on Nickelodeon in the afternoon, so we watched it. And this is poignant as hell-
R-E-C-Y-C-L-E Recycle!
C-O-N-S-E-R-V-E Conserve!
Don’t you P-O-L-L-U-T-E. Pollute the rivers, sky, or sea. Or else you’re gonna get what you deserve…I still sing it to myself sadly when I read the news sometimes.
“Fraggles don’t have any bosses […] We each lead ourselves and we all lead each other.” - Wembley Fraggle, Fraggle Rock
/continues to exploit the doozers
“Animals don’t behave like men,’ he said. ‘If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don’t sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures’ lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.” ― Richard Adams, Watership Down
That book does a really good job of presenting just how shitty humans are pretty much throughout, without coming across as being preachy or sanctimonious, and I like that.
Meanwhile:
Cats: torture their prey to death as a form of play.
Dolphins: you dont want to know.
If a person did half the stuff animals do, no one could look at them the same again.
People do some awful things but we are also probably the only species that has members that sympathise with other species above ourselves.
I once walked past like 20 ducks tearing apart one female to rape her. I’ll never feel bad eating meat.
Oh yeah I forgot about ducks… an animal so rapey that females evolved some weird reproductive anatomy to help defend against it.
