To Love and Be Loved

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

-From Margery Williams' The Velveteen Rabbit

The Velveteen Rabbit is another book that is as endearing to adults as it is to children. Looking at this book from the perspective of a child (when did that become so difficult?) it is a love story between a child and his play thing, his source of comfort. As an adult it takes on so much more meaning. That rabbit begins to symbolize ourselves. We understand how the rabbit feels when he is snubbed by the "fancy" mechanical toys for being plain. We know the joy he feels when the boy chooses him to love. We know the heartbreak that he feels when he can no longer be with the boy.

To me the most memorable part of this book is when the Velveteen Rabbit first sees the real rabbits. He realizes that although he loves the boy and being his toy that there is something beyond that. Although in the story the Velveteen Rabbit is parted from the boy because of an illness I look at him leaving the boy more as a metaphorical death. The rabbit has been loved, is old and tattered, is worn and tired. He is all of us in our old age and although he is no longer with the boy he becomes REAL. He becomes a rabbit who can dance and hop and leap and twirl. I would love to imagine Heaven as a place where we can leave behind all of our limitations, where we can become everything that we have always wanted to be and I think that is the reason that this book is so well loved.

The Velveteen Rabbit faces feelings of inadequacy, hopes for love and finds it, lives a long life with the boy, and then after he and the boy are parted finally gets to dance and jump as high as the sky. This book is a wonderful metaphor for life and I hope that we all have such a happy ending.