The Velveteen Rabbit

Wikipedia on The Velveteen Rabbit

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Margery Williams Bianco's 'The Velveteen Rabbit' still resonates 100 years later (NPR)

The notion of "what's real," says Stead, "carries with you for the rest of your life, with all of the relationships you have, all of the friendships that you'll make and all the times people aren't necessarily kind to you. There's a lot of insecurities. There's a lot of figuring out how you belong. It's hard to shake a story that's that honest."

...the Skin Horse tells the Rabbit:

"...by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the 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."

Amazon blurb:

"Once you are real, you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

We all pretend from time to time. Driven by a desire to create or maintain a certain image, we pretend to be more or different than who we actually are. We seem more interested in pretending to live interesting lives than actually living interesting lives.

One hundred years ago, Margery Williams saw the human condition so clearly that her story, The Velveteen Rabbit, has been embraced more with every passing generation. Perhaps that is because our need to become real has grown greater with each year.

Anyone or anything that prevents you from becoming real is simply too small for you.

There is one question the little rabbit doesn't ask the skin horse that seems ever-present in the human consciousness: How do we know when we have become real?

You have become real when you realize that you are enough.

YouTube has many versions of The Velveteen Rabbit, and these are the most toothsome I've found so far:

Meryl Streep, but just the first part:

a modern edition, read in American:

a 30-minute version, read in "a calming, (male) voice that aims to help you unwind. This is a soft spoken, soothing audiobook that aims to help you fall asleep."

25-minute reading by Xe Sands, with text

a British "full audiobook" reading:

another British reading, with the original illustrations:

and another British reading:

*** Matthew Kelly (who wrote the Introduction for the 100th Anniversary edition) on Becoming Real: