The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin 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 loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. 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 off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and 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 understand."
"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."
That passage from the old children’s classic The Velveteen Rabbit, originally published in 1922, was recently called back into my attention by reading a far less old article. The latter was a piece in the February 2007 edition of Harper’s Magazine in which at one point the above imaginary conversation between two well-loved toys was cited. That younger article was “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” by Johnathan Lethem.
So if you don’t like what you read in my post for today, blame Lethem, not me.
Margery Williams, author of The Velveteen Rabbit
* * *
An unused tool is a wasted tool. An unused tool is never set free to be what it was crafted to be.
That remains true regardless of how much cash profit the tool-manufacturer may have derived from the sale of that tool. Market-value itself is no tool for establishing the real worth of what carries cash-value, no matter how high the price.
The value of something on the global capitalist market of today bears no essential connection to the real value of anything. At least that is so in the rich sense of “real” that the old, love-worn Skin Horse discloses to the Velveteen Rabbit in the wonderfully worthwhile tale told in the lines with which I begin this post.
Worth noting at this point is that what is “worthwhile” is, quite literally and really, that with which one gladly whiles away time. In turn, to “while away time” is to spend time freely and pleasantly, fully enjoying the spending. To spend one’s whole life in just such a worthwhile way is to live lifelong in real leisure, which in turn lets life itself be what and as it is — real life!
Leisure is the complete absence of toil, as the very words ‘leisure’ and ‘toil’ themselves tell us, if we but listen to them attentive all the way to their roots. Indeed, ‘leisure’ and ‘toil’ are antonyms, and leisurely activity is the opposite of any sort of toil, also called “hard-labor.” Leisurely activity is, rather, activity done in full serenity, to use a synonymous, not antonymous, term. Leisurely activity keeps both what is acted upon and the action itself properly together at their real distance from one another, thereby letting both be just what and as they truly are. That holds true whether the leisurely activity concerned uses tools or plays with toys, or simply spends itself in pleasant company with pets or other loved ones as they go about their own leisurely loving lives.
Furthermore, when one whiles away one’s time one does so without ever counting the cost. To be sure, one does not count the cost in terms of the cash, if any, that one might spend in the process. Far more importantly, however, one does not count such cost in terms of the wear and tear such whiling may bring upon oneself.
A well-loved pet with two of his well-loved toys.
* * *
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in His hand Who saith "A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!''
That is the famous opening stanza of “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” a poem by Robert Browning (1812-1889), and Browning is right: growing old along with someone else is coming into one’s own along with the other. It is the fulfillment of both in their sharing a path unto death with one another — and, as a line in what is commonly known as the Saint Francis Prayer has it, “It is in dying that one enters into eternal life.”
So be it!