Im going to see if I can write a slightly better review now than my original (2020) one. In that one, I was a little tight, you know. I was like, not against it, not against CSS, and I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t for the sort of dismissal of the series, you know…. But implicitly I wasn’t sure it was for me, even if I didn’t want to admit it, you know. Oh, I wanted soul, you know—the Soul of the World! But I wasn’t sure I wanted to be soft and social and happy, you know. “It’s basically fat water,” says Valencia (the hot new girlfriend) dismissively in “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” season 1 (2015), of literal chicken soup. She also says, “I’ve been hungry since 1998”—like, get over it…. Grasp the thorn.

I mean, I guess I could airbrush quickly over the criticisms, right. It’s not like you have to stay in the darkness for a long time with these books, mostly because the stories are so short. I really don’t think that they’re necessarily or even usually writing about unimportant or trivial things, it’s just that each story is telescoped or whatever into just a few pages, so it’s not exactly dramatic suspense, you know. (No creepy castles with Victoria Holt and her girlfriends.) It’s short: as soon as you get into the problem, boom, son! You get out! Lol (Of course…. Well, I don’t know. I didn’t plan that, I’m sorry. God, Im making it worse.)

But then, Im not sure it’s beneficial to immediately reject, overtly or covertly, a book just because it has a section on parenting, or opens with an intro story about getting a girlfriend, because if you insist on fighting the flower goddess, she might trip you up, like setting you up for conflict instead of peace, just as surely as excluding Athena sets you up for storm-clouds and Wagner operas, you know.

I don’t know.

The point is, it’s not trivial; they will occasionally give you a few lines about “my kid asked me about death”—and not just FaceTime gossip about their kid getting into business school, for running a science museum; they’re doing it all, and what is your kid doing, boom, son!—but even in the classic CSS wrap-up glitter and flower stories, well…. To say that other people need it sometimes, is toleration. To say that we need it sometimes, is reality, right.

After all, it’s bad to get tripped up and embarrassed by the flower girl, but it’s also bad to bury her, and Win, you know.

…. Re: “(If you have something nice to say) Just Say It”: there’s been a generational change here where we now pay lip service to this, although that itself makes it seem trite: “I love you, Mom” starts to mean, “I’m ready to hang up the phone now.” But aside from our deficient practice of this principle, it’s possible to see what they are getting it, both then and now. In the famous play about Romans called “Julius Caesar”, once Brutus is dead, the Caesarians are happy to say that he was the best among the Roman Republicans, that he tried living according to his lights. But when he was alive, before the battle, they just said that they wanted to kill him, and in the most childish way, you know. (Unconsciousness understood is consciousness, that’s fine; it’s just that Back Then is a lie, you know.)

…. It is possible to learn-things-about-life, from simple stories, and it’s certainly true that learning—and learning about life—matters. But it’s equally true that sometimes learning is learning that we can Do things, you know. Life isn’t as satisfying, when we think we can’t take action.

Heute las ich dieses schöne Buch, das einem mitunter Tränen in die Augen zaubert. Es ist streckenweise irrsinnig 50er-Jahre-amerikanisch, aber die Botschaft (Liebe, Warmherzigkeit) ist natürlich dennoch sehr schön.
Ich mochte gleich die erste Geschichte gern ("Es gab eine Lehrerin" in der Geschichte "Liebe, die einzig schöpferische Kraft") und den Text "Ich bin Lehrer", den fand ich sogar fanatastisch. ( )

Interesting read. Very positive as is it’s purpose. Very twee in places. Take each story with a pinch of salt. It’s hard for one to know the ins and outs of each person’s story. ( )