Just bought a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit online. This passage was read out at the wedding on Saturday and now I’m fascinated with it. I see inspiration coming…
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when he and the toy horse were lying side by side near the nursery toybox, before Nana came in to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you, is it when someone winds you up, or is it when you have a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really, truly loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Horse, for he was always truthful. “But when you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or does it happen bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Horse. “You simply become it. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved right off you, and your eyes have dropped out and you have got all loose in the joints and you look 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 really understand you anyway, or what it means to be Real .“
