Lenona
2023-07-27 16:57:46 UTC
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."
(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."