Anthropomorphism
Jun. 10th, 2009 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
come_to_thinkReading: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I just finished it. I can't remember who recommended it to me.
Part of the charm of this book is the daring with which the author mixes his animal characters with human ones. The premise is that the wild animals are of human size & mix in human society, whereas the domesticated ones remain domesticated animals. That allows the rat, the toad, et al. to eat bacon without raising the reader's eyebrows. The discordance is merely amusing.
I envied the toad his efficient self-esteem machinery. I believe that everyone has the right to enough self-deception to enable self-respect, but that is a hard maxim to apply to oneself, and it is nice to see a safely fictitious character get away with overdoing it. His friends love him all the same, and dare to criticize him. To me, that looks like paradise.
Part of the charm of this book is the daring with which the author mixes his animal characters with human ones. The premise is that the wild animals are of human size & mix in human society, whereas the domesticated ones remain domesticated animals. That allows the rat, the toad, et al. to eat bacon without raising the reader's eyebrows. The discordance is merely amusing.
I envied the toad his efficient self-esteem machinery. I believe that everyone has the right to enough self-deception to enable self-respect, but that is a hard maxim to apply to oneself, and it is nice to see a safely fictitious character get away with overdoing it. His friends love him all the same, and dare to criticize him. To me, that looks like paradise.
