This one is good as well, although sometimes I wish he had a main narration to the book. He often gives fragmentary stories that are incredibly interesting. But reading this book felt like watching TikTok videos. You get many entertaining pieces disconnected from each other. Hope it makes sense!
Yes, the art is beautiful; it’s easy to see why it was inspirational.
Not to be curmudgeonly about a cultural icon…but in the book, Salten, an avid hunter, paints a much more realistic picture of nature’s moral indifference than Disney’s mythical portrayal ever would. The studio obviously wasn’t animating a documentary, but it did apply what I think is a misleading veneer of innocence to “nature, red in tooth and claw”. I think some of us may have been better served as children to witness and understand nature’s organic “R for Restricted” rating.
Salten understood nature and deer ecology in a way Disney and his animators would never depict. He showed that beauty, violence and death are continuous features of nature, and only rendered them melodramatic by his pen. His book is almost a treatise on mortality and ecological competition; even mature Bambi engages in duels to near-death with other bucks: “Karus knew that Bambi was furious and would kill him without mercy”…Bambi charged blindly at [Ronno]. His eyes flashed. He seemed to have no thought of mercy.”
This all brought to mind one of my favorite poets, Sara Teasdale. She, like Salten, reminds us nature is not a utopian moral community besieged by man the evil ogre. When Bambi and the Old Stag come across the body of a dead poacher, the Stag says “Do you see, Bambi, do you see how He’s lying there dead, like one of us?” (Message: man is not exempt from the ecological order). Salten and Teasdale’s characterizations reflect my experience as a hunter: the forest can be beautiful and harsh, uplifting and unsentimental, sublime and perilous. These verses from her “There Will Come Soft Rains” shape my decidedly non-Disney perspective when I take to the woods:
I loved Florian Illies’s 1913. As usual, you write a resoundingly interesting piece Vashik. 🙏
This one is good as well, although sometimes I wish he had a main narration to the book. He often gives fragmentary stories that are incredibly interesting. But reading this book felt like watching TikTok videos. You get many entertaining pieces disconnected from each other. Hope it makes sense!
1913 is that way as well. Vignettes, but somehow it all kind of comes together to tell the story.
Yes, the art is beautiful; it’s easy to see why it was inspirational.
Not to be curmudgeonly about a cultural icon…but in the book, Salten, an avid hunter, paints a much more realistic picture of nature’s moral indifference than Disney’s mythical portrayal ever would. The studio obviously wasn’t animating a documentary, but it did apply what I think is a misleading veneer of innocence to “nature, red in tooth and claw”. I think some of us may have been better served as children to witness and understand nature’s organic “R for Restricted” rating.
Salten understood nature and deer ecology in a way Disney and his animators would never depict. He showed that beauty, violence and death are continuous features of nature, and only rendered them melodramatic by his pen. His book is almost a treatise on mortality and ecological competition; even mature Bambi engages in duels to near-death with other bucks: “Karus knew that Bambi was furious and would kill him without mercy”…Bambi charged blindly at [Ronno]. His eyes flashed. He seemed to have no thought of mercy.”
This all brought to mind one of my favorite poets, Sara Teasdale. She, like Salten, reminds us nature is not a utopian moral community besieged by man the evil ogre. When Bambi and the Old Stag come across the body of a dead poacher, the Stag says “Do you see, Bambi, do you see how He’s lying there dead, like one of us?” (Message: man is not exempt from the ecological order). Salten and Teasdale’s characterizations reflect my experience as a hunter: the forest can be beautiful and harsh, uplifting and unsentimental, sublime and perilous. These verses from her “There Will Come Soft Rains” shape my decidedly non-Disney perspective when I take to the woods:
“Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.“