Amazing article about the original book about Bambi, how it was harsh. How its author, Felix Salten, is better known for writing basically child pornography. It's about trusting no one, being independent and that's all there is to life.
The book is at its best when it revels in rather than pretends to resolve the mystery of existence. At one point, Bambi passes by some midges who are discussing a June bug. "How long will he live?" the young ones ask. "Forever, almost," their elders answer. "They see the sun thirty or forty times." Elsewhere, a brief chapter records the final conversation of a pair of oak leaves clinging to a branch at the end of autumn. They gripe about the wind and the cold, mourn their fallen peers, and try to understand what is about to happen to them. "Why must we fall?" one asks. The other doesn't now, but has questions of its own: "Do we feel anything, do we know anything about ourselves when we're down there?" The conversation tacks back and forth from the intimate to the existential. The two leaves worry about which of them will fall first; one of them, gone "yellow and ugly," reassures the other that is has barely changed at all. The response, just before the inevitable end, is startlingly moving: "You've always been so kind to me. I'm just beginning to understand how kind you are." That is the opposite of a paean to individualism: a belated but tender recognition of how much we mean to one another
Perhaps the most telling exchange in the book occurs, during that difficult winter, between Bambi's mother and his aunt. "It's hard to believe that it will ever be better," his mother says. His aunt responds, "It's hard to believe that it was ever any better."
