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  • "Talk to the animals" - about Narnia and Mary Poppins

    From Lenona@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jul 27 09:57:46 2023
    I found this 2008 excerpt from Laura Miller's book when I was searching for articles on the Mary Poppins chapter "John and Barbara's Story."

    (For those who don't know, that story is about infants LOSING their "ability" to talk to animals.)

    https://www.salon.com/2008/12/06/laura_miller/

    This touches on how we, as adults, generally no longer wish animals could talk.

    Quote:

    "It's at age one that we acquire our first words. This story, which made me so melancholy as a girl, is, among other things, about the price we pay for language, for the ability to tell our mothers that it's not our teeth that are upsetting us but
    something else. It alludes to what we have given up to be understood by her and all the other adults, our lost brotherhood with the rest of creation. Words are what separate us from the animals, or as Travers would have it, from the elements themselves,
    from everything that can simply be without the scrim of consciousness intervening."

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  • From Steve Hayes@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 29 05:46:06 2023
    On Thu, 27 Jul 2023 09:57:46 -0700 (PDT), Lenona <lenona321@yahoo.com>
    wrote:

    I found this 2008 excerpt from Laura Miller's book when I was
    searching for articles on the Mary Poppins chapter "John and Barbara's
    Story."

    (For those who don't know, that story is about infants LOSING their
    "ability" to talk to animals.)

    https://www.salon.com/2008/12/06/laura_miller/

    This touches on how we, as adults, generally no longer wish animals
    could talk.

    Quote:

    "It's at age one that we acquire our first words. This story, which
    made me so melancholy as a girl, is, among other things, about the
    price we pay for language, for the ability to tell our mothers that
    it's not our teeth that are upsetting us but something else. It
    alludes to what we have given up to be understood by her and all the
    other adults, our lost brotherhood with the rest of creation. Words
    are what separate us from the animals, or as Travers would have it,
    from the elements themselves, from everything that can simply be
    without the scrim of consciousness intervening."

    (reformatted for legibility)


    --
    Stephen Hayes, Author of The Year of the Dragon
    Sample or purchase The Year of the Dragon: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/907935
    Web site: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
    Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com
    E-mail: shayes@dunelm.org.uk or if you use Gmail hayesstw@telkomsa.net

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