Those of you who read my previous blog,
B is for Betsy, will remember the passionate affair I had with Adam Gopnik's writing. Long dormant, it has awoken again, inspired by a piece on Babar that he wrote for the September 22 issue of
The New Yorker called "Freeing the Elephants
". My interest was especially piqued by this comment about how literature reflects the temperament of three cultures and their corresponding great cities, cities I have come to consider my own.
He writes:
In London, in children's books, life is too orderly and one longs for the vitality of the wild; in Paris, order is an achievement, hard won against the natural chaos and cruelty of adult life; in New York, we begin most stories in an indifferent city and the child has to create a kind of order within it.
The rest of the article can be found here; I highly recommend it.
