Corduroy

Corduroy is one of the few books I remember reading in my own early childhood, though the first time I read it to Philip, in the early early days, I approached it gingerly. It had the miasma of sadness for me, of loss or of childhood lost, of Paul not seeing the Rock People anymore, or simply of guilt. Maybe I confused it with The Velveteen Rabbit; maybe it is just the grey wrapping of most of my childhood memories. Corduroy, it turns out, is a happy story. (Though I can guess where my twinge of guilt originated: Lisa does not bring Corduroy home right away, in part because his button is broken, and I always felt a great deal of guilt about neglecting any of my stuffed animals and toys.)

Philip has been play-acting as Corduroy. He piles up the blankets and, like Corduroy ascending the escalator, annournces "I've always wanted to climb a mountain!" Curiously, I am still Lisa, and he runs circles around me and demands: "Pick me up! Take me home! Fix my button!" Perhaps I am remembering reading it at an older age, but how strange that he identifies with the teddy bear rather than the child. Or perhaps it is not strange at all, because the book is called Corduroy, and because it is about Corduroy and his adventure, and Lisa only appears briefly at the beginning and the end, a maternal presence Corduroy didn't even know he longed for, who swoops in and gives him a home and fixes his button for Corduroy's own comfort, not even because it ever bothered her. (Or did it? Be wary of people who want to fix you "for your own good.")

Philip also flips the pages back and forth, distracted by (or focused on) the details in the images. (We have only a small board book version, and I am not sure how the illustrations compare with the original edition.) Why can he see the rocking horse and the lion on this page but not that page? Does the bunny get smaller? Why does he see Corduroy's shadow but not the night watchman's? Irrelevant to the story, sometimes, but I see an interest in presentation: was this on purpose? Was it incidental? Was it something incidental that helps me understand something bigger (for instance: how shadows work)? 

I have been bumbling about Anna Karenina in a similar fashion, trying to tease out what is Relevant from what is simply Russian, and of course finding no such dichotomy. Is Karenin a just sociopath, or is he heavily cultivated in this way for social success? Is Vronsky supposed to suck, or is he considered desirable for the place and time? How close is Anna's predicament to mine? Tolstoy seems to disdain the urban elite, the peasantry, the Marxists, the urban poor presumably if they were mentioned--I flip the pages back and forth, and, like Philip, I wonder which parts matter.