“What amazes me,” Sophie said, “is how you ever learned to
write in the first place.”
“One night,” he [the BFG] said, “I is blowing a dream
through a window and I sees this book lying on the little boy’s bedroom
table.” So the Big Friendly Giant
explains that, while he would never steal anything from a human, he borrowed it
for a short time. “Perhaps only about
eighty years,” the BFG said. “Soon I
shall be putting it back.”
“And that’s how you taught yourself to write?” Sophie asked
him.
“I is reading it hundreds of times,” the BFG said. “And I is still reading it and teaching new
words to myself and how to write them.
It is the most scrumdiddlyumptious story.”
Sophie took the book out of his hand. “’Nicholas Nickleby,’” she read aloud.
“By Dahl’s Chickens,” the BFG said.
(Quoted from The BFG, Chapter 14: Dreams, by Roald Dahl. Illustration by Quentin Blake).
Lately, I’ve been reading Generation Dead by Daniel
Waters. In the novel, Adam plays
football at a high school where teenagers are not just returning from the dead,
but also attending classes and petitioning to join the sports teams. Yearning to grow, Adam takes karate classes,
participates in a work-study program geared at enhancing the living’s
understanding of the Differently Biotic (the current, politically correct term
for zombies), and reads Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. We follow Adam’s interactions with his undead
friends, and in times of difficulty, Adam centers himself with words of wisdom
from Master Griffin his karate teacher.
But we never learn what he thinks of Wuthering Heights, or how the novel
impacts his life. I found this
disappointing, not only because it’s one of those classics of literature I
would someday like to read, but also because great stories have a way of
seeping into our consciousness, and coloring our view of the world.
When I picked up The BFG in the library sale room, I merely thought
it’d be interesting to compare it with one of Roald Dahl’s more popular
works. At most, I thought I might
mention it once in a post. When I
started reading it, I quickly grew tired of the way the giant spoke, and had to
slog through the novel for a while, before I learned to accept the dialogue as
a valid (and not excessive) aspect of the story. Yet by the time I had finished the novel, I
realized that I had really enjoyed it, and have since mentioned it several
times in this blog.
At the Austin Zoo, humans shared the paths with peacocks and
chickens. When I found myself posing for
a photo before a particularly large example of the latter, I couldn’t help but
reflect on how much Dahl’s literature has seeped into our lives. Nearly all of us, from every walk of life,
either read his delightful books in our youth (while learning to read and
write), read them to children, or watched adaptations in the cinema. Thus, we live in the shadow of Dahl’s literature. The paradigm through which we view the world is
colored in part by the characters and situations he created. Whether we engage in his delightful humor,
strut around in our finest attire, or cluck over our children, we are all
Dahl’s chickens.
I think I’ll
have corn for lunch.
Dragon Dave
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