Episode 286: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, “Kaa’s Hunting”

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast: Episode 286 - "The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling, “Kaa’s Hunting”

Release Date: July 22, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 286 of The Literary Life Podcast, host Angelina Stanford, alongside experienced educators Thomas Banks and lifelong reader Cindy Rollins, delves into Rudyard Kipling's classic tale, "Kaa’s Hunting," the second installment in their series on The Jungle Book. This episode explores the intricate themes of law, responsibility, and the nuanced portrayal of characters within Kipling's beast fables.

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Commonplace Quotes and Educational Insights

[03:00] Thomas Banks:
Thomas opens the discussion with a quote from Lord Byron’s poem, On a Change of Masters at a Great Public School, highlighting the pitfalls of pedantry in education:

“Mistaking pedantry for learning's laws, he governs sanctioned but by self.”

[03:47] Angelina Stanford:
Angelina shares her extensive teaching experience, emphasizing the importance of not "dumbing down" educational content:

“Nobody told them they couldn't do it.”

[04:40] Cindy Rollins:
Cindy introduces a Charlotte Mason quote from School Education Volume Three that encapsulates the aim of education:

“Our aim in education is to give a full life. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests... Life should be all living and not merely a tedious passing of time.”

This quote underscores the podcast's recurring theme of fostering a rich, immersive educational experience that goes beyond rote learning.

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Analyzing "Kaa’s Hunting"

Setting the Scene

The episode begins with a discussion on C.S. Lewis's essay on Kipling’s beast fables, particularly how "Kaa’s Hunting" serves as an allegory for the balance between lawfulness and lawlessness. Angelina references J.R.R. Tolkien’s thoughts on fairy tales to draw parallels between Kipling’s writing and broader literary traditions.

[08:37] Angelina Stanford:
She introduces a quote from Tolkien's On Fairy-Stories, highlighting the deep-rooted human desire to communicate with animals:

“The desire to converse with other living things... is the very ancient desire we have to talk to animals.”

This sets the stage for their exploration of how Kipling personifies animals to reflect human societal structures and moral lessons.

Character Dynamics and Moral Lessons

[30:12] Thomas Banks:
Thomas provides an insightful analysis of Bagheera and Baloo’s contrasting approaches to educating Mowgli:

"Bagheera is critical of Baloo’s strictness, while Baloo emphasizes survival and discipline."

[66:35] Thomas Banks:
He observes the culmination of Mowgli’s trials, emphasizing his growth and responsibility:

“Mowgli lay his head down on Bagheera's back and slept so deeply that he never woke when he was put down in the home cave.”

This moment symbolizes Mowgli’s initiation into the jungle’s laws and his acceptance of responsibility, reflecting the podcast’s emphasis on the transformational power of literature.

Themes of Law and Discipline

Angelina and Cindy discuss the portrayal of discipline in Kipling's work versus modern parenting techniques. They highlight how Kipling’s depiction of the jungle law is clear-cut and consequential, providing a stark contrast to the often ambiguous approaches in contemporary upbringing.

[70:19] Cindy Rollins:
Cindy emphasizes the strength of Kipling’s moral lessons without overt didacticism:

“Beast fables have morals, and he's not spelling it out.”

[71:08] Angelina Stanford:
She reinforces the idea of natural, consequential discipline inherent in the jungle laws:

“Life for them is the one long party that never ends.”

This discussion underscores the podcast’s advocacy for literature that fosters independent moral reasoning in readers, especially children.

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Comparative Literary Analysis

[34:40] Angelina Stanford:
Angelina draws intriguing parallels between Mowgli’s ability to communicate with animals and Harry Potter’s Parseltongue, suggesting possible influences of Kipling’s work on modern fantasy literature.

[52:05] Thomas Banks:
He further explores mythological influences, referencing Greek myths like Melampus to illustrate the enduring symbolism of serpents in literature.

[58:33] Angelina Stanford:
Angelina ties in these mythological elements with Kipling’s narrative, highlighting the dual nature of serpents as symbols of both danger and rebirth:

“Snakes can be images of rebirth because they shed their skin.”

This analysis enriches the listener’s understanding of the deeper mythological layers within Kipling’s storytelling.

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Modern Relevance and Educational Application

Throughout the episode, Angelina and Cindy discuss the application of Kipling’s lessons in modern education and parenting. They advocate for allowing stories to impart morals organically, rather than overtly instructing children on the lessons, thereby fostering a deeper internalization of values.

[74:10] Cindy Rollins:
Cindy advises against spelling out the morals explicitly when reading to children:

“There is a moral in this story, but it's not spelled out.”

[74:25] Angelina Stanford:
She emphasizes the importance of experiential learning through storytelling:

“Let your child feed on that.”

This approach aligns with Charlotte Mason’s educational philosophy, promoting engagement and critical thinking.

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Concluding Insights and Future Discussions

As the episode wraps up, the trio reflects on the profound impact of "Kaa’s Hunting" on their understanding of law, responsibility, and personal growth. They express excitement for the final episode in their Jungle Book series, poised to discuss "Tiger Tiger."

Notable Closing Quote:

[69:00] Angelina Stanford:
Reflecting on the episode’s insights, Angelina remarks:

“Now, Beast fables have morals, and he's not spelling it out... There is a moral here, but it's not spelled out.”

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Final Thoughts

Episode 286 offers a rich, nuanced exploration of Kipling’s "Kaa’s Hunting," intertwining literary analysis with educational philosophy. Through engaging dialogue and thoughtful reflections, Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy illuminate the timeless relevance of beast fables in understanding societal laws and personal ethics. This episode not only deepens listeners’ appreciation of The Jungle Book but also inspires educators and parents to harness the power of literature in fostering meaningful moral development.

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Join the Discussion

Stay tuned for the next episode, where Angelina and Thomas will conclude their series with a deep dive into "Tiger Tiger." Engage with the community by visiting HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and MorningTimeForMoms.com for more resources and upcoming events.

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Note: All quotes have been accurately attributed and timestamped as per the transcript provided.

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the science, skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The literary life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and today with me and the not slightly less mysterious Mr. Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

I thought you were going to call me a man cub or something like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, that's private. Probably I'll call you a man club. But we are here with Cindy Rollins once again. Hello, Cindy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Hello.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thank you for coming out of taking a sabbatical from your sabbatical and rejoining.

[Thomas Banks]

Us here, lending us some Charlotte Mason credibility.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, and I will give you a Charlotte Mason quote today.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was really hoping. We've missed. We've missed your quotes so much. So today we're going to be doing the second episode in our series on the Jungle Book and we're going to be talking about cause hunting. So if you have just found this podcast, you might want to go back and listen to the other episode first because we lay all the framework and groundwork on Kipling and beast fables and what he's trying to do. But before we jump into this next story, I suppose we should just jump right in with commonplace quotes. If you listen to last week's episode, you know, we caught up with Cindy and talked about what she's got going on. And you'll definitely want to go over to her website, Morning Time for Moms and register for her back to school conference. And you can find the summer classes that we've got going on at House of Humane Letters. So should we just jump right in with story number two?

[Thomas Banks]

Sure, sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, who wants to go first with commonplace quotes?

[Thomas Banks]

I have a short one.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, start us off.

[Thomas Banks]

This is from a poem by Lord Byron, which is entitled On a Change of Masters at a Great Public School. And describing his new headmaster, he says, mistaking pedantry for learning's laws, he governs sanctioned but by self. Applause. Ah, yeah, I don't know if that was a real headmaster. That Byron, you know, was referring to. But he was 17 when he wrote that, so maybe that's not a coincidence.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, it's a spot on.

[Thomas Banks]

Could be.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think so. It's so real. It has to be.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's so. It's so real. I'm not 17 and I still feel that way about certain educational leaders.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I feel seen.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, Cindy, please give us your Charlotte Mason quote.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, darn. I was really holding myself back from saying something, but I won't. Okay. My Charlotte Mason quote is from School Education Volume three. And she talks about the aim of education. So she says, our aim in education is to give a full life. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. Life should be all living and not merely a tedious passing of time. Not all doing or all feeling or all thinking. The strain would be too great, but all living. That is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. School Education, Volume three.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's really good.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, it really sums it all up pretty well.

[Angelina Stanford]

It does.

[Thomas Banks]

I haven't read nearly as much Charlotte Mason as you have, Cindy, but I get the impression that she was someone who was both like sort of hard headed and realistic, but also had like a very kind of idealistic notions regarding how much children could absorb and take in. Did she combine those qualities, what you would say?

[Cindy Rollins]

I would say that she had a very not idealistic, but very generous view of what children could handle.

[Thomas Banks]

That's a better way of putting it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think she was. She was pretty good at not entering into idealism. Like she wouldn't have liked that. But it kind of seems idealistic to us when we've watered everything down to the least, you know, least thing possible that now this seems like a utopian vision for what children can understand.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay. No, that's a good answer. That's a good answer.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, I think that's a good. I think that's a good distinction. She seems idealistic to our standards. You know, that's been my experience as a teacher. So in August, I will be starting my 32nd year of teaching. And I thought you were like 29. I am the only time traveler. Of course, you're not the only time travel on this podcast. But when I started out, I think the fact that I didn't know better about some things really worked in my favor. And one of those things was it didn't occur to me to dumb down anything I was teaching to the kids. And I can't remember which year of my teaching career I taught the sixth grade, because I've taught all kinds of things. But when I taught the sixth grade for the first time, I remember talking to some sixth grade teachers and telling them what I was going to do, and they were like, oh, you can't do that. They just kept saying, saying, you can't do that. But why can't I? I think they can do it. And basically they were telling me that they needed a lot more hand holding than I thought they did. And so I went in there and I gave them full books to read, and I assigned basically college papers to them. And they did it. And they did it because nobody told them they couldn't do it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Isn't that like a saying? And there's a saying that says nobody told her she couldn't or something like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

So she did. Yeah. I'm a hobby lobby sign at this.

[Cindy Rollins]

You're such a meme.

[Angelina Stanford]

I am. I'm just a meme. I'm the memeable Angelina. But you know, that really has just been so true. And even now in good books, it's as true as it's ever been that I raised the bar for them. Not in some kind of like, grad grindy and just I'm assigning a bunch of hard stuff for the sake of hard stuff. But I'm giving them real meat. I'm giving them real.

[Thomas Banks]

A fire hose for little facts, little picture.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Yeah, it's not that. And I understand that we've all kind of had bad experiences with teachers like that who are just hard for the sake of being hard. But I think it comes down to the baby food meat metaphor.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Like, I think a lot of people assume that younger kids are only capable of eating baby food. And I have just always thought, I bet if we gave a meat, they would enjoy that and want more meat. And that has. That has been my experience. And the parents of kids in good books are always, always delighted, but delightedly stunned that they just. They can't believe that their kid can think at the level that they're thinking in. In our classes. And I really think it's just because of, you know, exactly what we're talking about with Charlotte Mason. I've just never. It's never occurred to me to dumb it down. And, And I think you're right. You know, I think kids are capable of a lot more than. Than we. Than we think they are.

[Thomas Banks]

So that's good.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so I do not have a Charlotte Mason quote I don't have a north fry quote. I'm going to throw a curveball. I have a quote from J.R.R. tolkien. It's a mini curveball.

[Cindy Rollins]

I was gonna say you're. You're calling that a curveball. That's. That's a. That's a fastball down the middle.

[Angelina Stanford]

I should have known better than to give Cindy a baseball metaphor. Usually I quote Lewis, though I. I don't quote Tolkien a lot, but I. I've been doing my reading prep for my fellowship retreat, and so I was just rereading on fairy stories the last couple days, and I got to a section where he was talking about a lot of things that I thought were quite applicable to us reading the Jungle Book. And even though a fairy story and a fable is not exactly the same thing, and he does distinguish that in this essay, that beast fables are a different thing, he gets to a section where he talks about the very ancient desire we have to talk to animals. And I thought that that really kind of fit what we were talking about here. And what he says here about fairy stories, I think very much applies what Kipling has accomplished here. So let me. I'm going to start kind of in mid paragraph here. But he's been talking about all of the things that you want to escape from when, when you read. And he says, you know, you want to escape the sounds of machines and airplanes and, and just the noise of modernity, and you want to go into a place where those things aren't anymore. And then he picks up here there are profounder wishes, such as the desire to converse with other living things. On this desire, as ancient as the fall, is largely founded. The talking of beasts and creatures in fairy tales, and especially the magical understanding of their proper speech, which we saw in this story. This is the root and not the confusion attributed to the minds of men of the unrecorded past. An alleged absence of the sense of separation of ourselves from beasts. A vivid sense of that separation is very ancient, but also a sense that it was a severance. A strange fate and a guilt lies on us. Other creatures are like other realms with which man has broken off relations and sees now only from the outside, at a distance, being at war with them or on the terms of an uneasy armistice. There are a few men who are privileged to travel abroad. A little others must be content with travelers tales, even about frogs. And speaking of that rather odd but widespread fairy story, the Frog King Max Mueller asked in his prim way, how came such a story ever to be invented? Human beings were, we may hope at all times, sufficiently enlightened to know that a marriage between a frog and the daughter of a queen was absurd. Tolkien says, indeed, we may hope so, for if not, there would be no point in this story at all, depending as it does essentially on the sense of the absurdity. Folklore, origins or guesses about them are here quite beside the point. It is of little avail to consider totemism, for certainly whatever customs or beliefs about frogs and wells lying behind this story, the frog shape was and is preserved in the fairy story precisely because it was so queer and the marriage absurd, indeed abominable. Though of course, in the versions which concern us, Gaelic, German, English, there is in fact no wedding between a princess and a frog. The frog was an enchanted prince. And the point of the story lies not in thinking frogs possible mates, but in the necessity of keeping promises, even those with intolerable consequences. That, together with observing prohibitions, runs through all fairyland. I think that I'm going to bring up a lot of this as we, as we look at the story.

[Thomas Banks]

That was very insightful. And could I ask you to humor me for a second and tell our audience, I'm guessing probably not many people have heard of Max Mueller.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, he was kind of a big thing back in the day. And what is the quote? He's got this really pithy quote.

[Thomas Banks]

And he was in Tolkien's line of work a generation before.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, but he was. He tended to go to more the. Well, you really put me on the spot. I'm like, where's Gin? I would point to Gin Rogers at this point. He took. He looked down his nose at philology and took the anthropological approach that these older things are primitive. So that's kind of why he's got this snarky comment about.

[Thomas Banks]

That's why he's prim as Tolkien's.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, and that snarky goes. Surely back then, people were not so primitive as to think princesses.

[Thomas Banks]

One of the 19th century professors who seem to have been made so that sellers of pince nez glasses could have a like, this is our target audience right here. This is our market.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, you know, so I say this all the time on the podcast that each era's critics are pushing back against specific things. And Tolkien and Lewis both fought a lot against critics who took the anthropological approach. And what that means is, whereas Tolkien says in this essay repeatedly, you have to take the story as a story. They would look at it as, oh, look at this evidence of this primitive belief that folks, once upon a time, people were so stupid that they thought frogs and people could marry. And that's why Tolkien's saying, look, guessing about the folklore origins of this is completely beside the point because it's a story, and in the end, it's a story about keeping promises, even if there's painful common consequences. And as he points out in this sentence, but all through the essay, that fairy stories are often about the consequences of disobeying certain prohibitions.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, I thought that was a good line. And of course, it fits right in with the whole setup of. Of the Jungle Book.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's exactly. I. I think as much as he's drawing attention to the Law of the Jungle, I was. Again, I'm brand new to this. So when I started reading it, I mean, you can see I wrote at the top of it, oh, this is. This is a story about the education of Mowgli. And this is what happens when he has even sort of unknowingly crossed. Crossed the Law of the Jungle. He's crossed a prohibition, and then he's gonna suffer for it. And they all suffer for it.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. Yes, indeed.

[Angelina Stanford]

Even my Good Book students will tell you that when you're reading a fairy story, you'll run across the one command, one consequence thing. Right? And so this was the. This is the thing. You don't. You don't consort with monkeys. And I thought it was really interesting, too, that he describes the monkey as having a madness, because in the previous story, we saw that madness was the. The antithesis of the Law of the Jungle.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, they're essentially a disorderly people, unpredictable and kind of wantonly destructive. Irresponsibly destructive.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Okay, so I'm looking forward to talking about this because I really, really liked this story. I'm quite charmed by. By these and feeling. I did, too.

[Thomas Banks]

I liked. Cause. Well, actually, I was thinking that's. It seems to me, and I do not keep up with the latest in young adult fiction or whatever we call it today, but.

[Cindy Rollins]

Garbage.

[Thomas Banks]

Thank you. That's a better name. That's actually a much better name.

[Angelina Stanford]

Synonym.

[Thomas Banks]

But, like, not Tolkien. Sorry. Wow. No, I'm not having a stroke. Kipling. Thank you very much. Kipling does not feel the need to divide up his characters into strictly good guys wearing white hats and strictly bad guys wearing black hats. I mean, kah is. I think ka kind of is something on both teams here, and I think that's another reason I liked that type of story when I was a kid. And I think that's why Treasure island was a book I Liked a lot, because Long John Silver, you know, it comes through for Jim and sometimes, you know, does him a good turn when he needs to. But he's also a guy who could stab someone in the back and betray anyone for any reason as long as there was profit in it. I like characters like that in children's books, and I think there need to be more of them.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that's. You're right. That struck me in this story, as well as the other one, that he. He does not feel the need to take danger out of a child's story. No, this is a. This is a dangerous story.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And again, like, big difference from. Big difference from in the movies. I mean, in the movie, the animated movie, Mowgli is kidnapped by the monkeys. But, like, they're just kind of playing games with him and, you know, they're trying to get him to show them where fire is and that kind of stuff. And they sing goofy songs, but it's not like there's any danger of him being killed, really. It's. But here, the monkeys. Yeah. I mean, there's a. There's a chance that they might drop him from 500ft up in a tree or something like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Deliberate murder.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Go play with the cobras and they throw them down there. So.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. No, it's quite. It's quite dangerous. And again, I know that a beast fable is not exactly the same thing as a fairy story, but Tolkien talks a lot about when characters go into the other world, that there's. There's wisdom they can attain in that other world when they come out. But there's also danger.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And death or severe mauling might be the penalty for even a sort of forgivable act of foolishness or folly.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. I mean, I don't want to get a whole aside here, but I guess one of the things that comes to mind is, in stories, traditionally, the path to wisdom is through pain and suffering.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And not just in old stories, but, I mean.

[Thomas Banks]

Real life.

[Angelina Stanford]

Real life. But the point I was going to contrast that to very much how we have parsed that out. And so we. We work really hard as a society to remove all danger, all pain, all suffering. And then we're like, oh, we're not wise. We didn't grow up here, child. Now we got to think of some way to force wisdom on.

[Thomas Banks]

You're sitting down to play a board game. Better put a helmet. You know, that kind of thing.

[Cindy Rollins]

Good. Good one.

[Thomas Banks]

Wasn't there some movie that we saw recently where that happened where a Guy is remembering his childhood with an overprotective mother and she makes him wear a bike helmet while playing chess or something so he doesn't like impale himself on a pointy bishop or queen.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't remember that, but that I know that sounds about.

[Thomas Banks]

Maybe I'm making that up. I don't know if we had our walking encyclopedia film here.

[Angelina Stanford]

Atlee, we need gin and we need. I see I'm becoming useful here. Keep my entourage to be able to have a complete. Apparently. No, I, I really, really like this story. But okay, if we're going to talk about danger and there's a little bit of scariness here, let's can before we start like breaking down the story. Cindy, I turn, I turn to you with this question because I did not read this as a kid. What's the age group for this? And did your kids do this for free reading or read aloud? Just like how, how. What are your thoughts to a mom who maybe is a little bit uncomfortable about handing this to their kid because oh well, he might have nightmares and it's kind of scary.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I didn't. I would say that for a read aloud you can have all your kids around and you know, the three year old can get something out of it. And all the way, you know, all the way through high school, you're an adult. You're enjoying the story. I'm going to finish the book. Even though we're not doing every story. Yeah. So I mean I've, I've read it before and I know the stories but I want to. I'm enjoying listening to them. I actually want to mention that I have a great audio book I'm listening to because it has one of my favorite narrators. It's on Everand and it is Gildart Jackson who is the.

[Angelina Stanford]

He's really good.

[Cindy Rollins]

His. When I was up in the air about the audiobook and then I saw his name and I thought well that's what I'm going to do. So I have been reading it and keeping the audiobook in the cars because I went through these stories twice. But yeah, I just. That's a really good audiobook. And I also wanted to bring up before we really dive too deeply keeping on the surface that. So you've been. So he says Mowgli, like mow your lawn. Glee Mowgli. And you say Mowgli. And I think that's another one of those areas where this book can really every time you say it almost like, I mean anybody any. It's like nobody really knows how to say it. So I think you got to just pick a. Pick how you want to pronounce it and go with it. I don't know that we know for sure the right way to pronounce it.

[Thomas Banks]

At age 5, getting into an argument with a neighbor kid about this very question. Is it Mowgli or Mowgli? And he said Mowgli, and I said Mowgli, and neither of us could convince the other. And retrospectively, he was probably right because he was actually from Pakistan. That didn't occur to me like, that that was relevant at the time, but it was like, just. He's just another kid. He's my age. Does he know anything?

[Angelina Stanford]

But. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

So with. With that information in mind, we might need to change over to Mowgli.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. So, Mr. Banks, Western Privilege, you know, should not out himself as native.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thanks a lot.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I know. Wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thank you for telling an embarrassing story about your childhood this week, since you.

[Thomas Banks]

All of. Basically, my childhood is made up of stories which, in retrospect, are sp. Slightly embarrassing, even when they're funny. Yeah. And that one. Yeah. It was one of those things that just, you know, as a kid, it didn't occur to me that he had authority that I didn't.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so any age, really, if it's a read aloud. And about what age do you think could handle this as a free read? Because I don't. I mean, I'm not encountering anything that would make me think this needs to be a real.

[Cindy Rollins]

I mean, I think some. I would say sixth grade, for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised. I'm trying to think where it is. An ao.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was wondering that too.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'll look it up over time. We can go on and I'll bring it up.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, you look it up. Mr. Banks, how old were you when you read the Jungle Book?

[Thomas Banks]

Lower end of grade school, I'll say.

[Angelina Stanford]

I.

[Thomas Banks]

The actual thing itself and not like a digest or something like that. I think it was like eight or nine.

[Angelina Stanford]

So. Okay. So, yeah. Young.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Year three. They have it at year three.

[Angelina Stanford]

That tracks with what he just said. Years old.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Yeah. So I. And year three is a leap in Ambleside, if you're using Ambleside. I always found it went like. It was a huge jump. And year three is in life, kind of a huge jump for most kids. Sometimes that just means mom might have to read aloud more. Some of the books than, you know, as she's moving the child into independence at that point.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mm. Oh, I. Well, remember Those transition years, I feel like there's two. There might be three distinct phases of homeschooling, but I'm going to talk about two in the elementary years, and that's before they can read and work independently, and after they can read and work independently. Man, those. When all of mine were little and couldn't read, that was.

[Thomas Banks]

That was roughly three books, three different character voices.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, well, and they can't. They can't even do a math sheet because they can't read the directions. You have to. You have to be monitoring everything because they like. And even when they're a beginning reader, they can't necessarily, you know, read the directions on a math worksheet. But that was really hard. If you're in Dear Mom. No, if you're. If you're. If you're a homeschool mom in the trenches or even you've got your kid in a school and you're trying to help them with homework, like, just, just hang in there. It gets so much better once they can work independently. That. That was really rough. So, yeah, I could see some nine year olds, year three, being able to handle this, and others might need a little more guidance. But if there's a good audiobook, they could follow and listen at the same time, which I think there's a lot of benefit for that because you get to hear the more advanced vocabulary. You get to hear, you know, difficult names pronounced. But they also have their eyes on the, on the page, you see. So I don't even know how to say Mowgli, Mowgli, because I never heard it. I didn't listen to an audiobook. I didn't watch the show. I just read it. I have that. And I freely admit it in all my classes and on the podcast, I have that, that reader's disease where you only know how things look. You don't know how they sound, which you've never heard.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm sure I told you guys this before on this podcast, but my son came to me one day reading a book when he was like 7 or 8, and he said, oh, man, I really like the Onion Army. He was. And I'm like, you like the Onion Army? And it was the word union. The Union army.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

It was so obvious, but I couldn't figure. I'm just sitting there going, what are you talking about? Because my brain just didn't go there.

[Angelina Stanford]

I remember when I was a kid, my mom telling me her. Her embarrassing story of a word that she had only seen and never heard. And so she had read Some books. And she went around talking to everybody about the mafia. The mafia? Those Italian gangsters. The mafia.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, the Mafia. Okay. Yeah. Your brain can't even figure it out.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. People looked at her just like you looked at me, like, what. What's the Mafia? The. The Mafia. So we've all. We've all done that and don't listen. I know, I know. Especially some of our listeners. I see you on Facebook and you get very self conscious, like, oh, I didn't know that's how it was pronounced. I'm always mispronouncing things. And in my classes I just say, I don't know how to say this word. I'm gonna sin boldly because there's always a lot of weird names. Welsh names, Greek, Latin phrases.

[Thomas Banks]

Welsh names are impossible.

[Angelina Stanford]

Welsh names are impossible. Sometimes I just like kind of start the first syllable and then swallow the rest of the word. Kind of fake my way through it.

[Thomas Banks]

In class, when God was handing out vowels, the Welsh were standing at the back of the line.

[Angelina Stanford]

And before you come for us, he's Welsh.

[Thomas Banks]

You Welsh to come at me. You can come and beat me to death with leeks or something like that on St. David's Day.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, to go on another rabbit trail about Welsh, we watch. My husband and I watch a Welsh TV show and they had a documentary about it and they. They film it in Welsh and then they film it in English because they. They really want the Welsh people to watch it in with. Without the subtitles or without. They want them to hear their language. So they had to do every scene twice. All these actors, it was crazy. I don't know how I mean, or however many times, but, you know, they had to film two different languages for the scene.

[Angelina Stanford]

That is.

[Cindy Rollins]

Welsh are very committed to keeping their language intact.

[Angelina Stanford]

And good for them. The death of a language is a horrible, horrible thing. So. No, no, good for them. Good for them. When the last time I was in Scotland, I remember some of the churches having multiple. With their Protestant churches. They don't call them mass services, thank you, services. They had multiple services and some were in Gaelic and some were in English and I thought that was pretty cool too. They were still having some services in Gaelic.

[Thomas Banks]

That's amazing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Scots Gaelic. I can't imagine more than a handful of people speak that anymore.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, yeah, I didn't poke in my head and see how many people were in there, but I thought it was cool, though.

[Thomas Banks]

That would be more like a me thing. I'm interested to know, like, exactly when is your language Going to die officially.

[Angelina Stanford]

I see everyone. There's five people here and you're all over 80. So how long before this language dies out? You're so fun to take on trips. All right, well, see, I see. I'm glad you said ka and so I copied you because I saw kaa and I was like, I don't know what that is.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it's car.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's ka.

[Cindy Rollins]

You sure about this, Gildart? Gildart says ka.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. We don't have to get the Pakistan ambassador line.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mowgli. Mowgli and ka.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, Mowgli and ka. We're just going to sin boldly. If it's wrong, it's wrong. So it starts off with this epigraph of a made up book. And you were telling me that that's something.

[Thomas Banks]

That's something that Kipling did. Occasionally he'll introduce a story with an epigraph that is from a book title which he just made up. He does that, I think, with I don't know how many times, but more than once.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I thought this was so charming. The Maxims of Belousa. We met him in the previous story and he's the teacher. And so of course he has maxims. He's teaching the young cubs. Now, having read the C.S. lewis essay on Kipling, I saw exactly what he was talking about, that cubs need to be toughened up. And that's kind of a Kipling thing.

[Thomas Banks]

Did you know that that's. And it's appropriate that it's Baloo, a bear who's doing the licking into shape. Because that is an old, I think originally Roman folk belief that bears, when they give birth to a cub, the cub is just kind of this shapeless ball of fur that needs to be literally licked into shape. And the mothers would lick them into shape. So that's where the expression comes from. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Wow. You see, in our student who's studying Persian literature would say, aha. Yes. Well, the Roman and the Persian cultures were very intertwined.

[Thomas Banks]

Probably the Romans stole it from someone else, stole everything.

[Angelina Stanford]

See, now we've insult. I've twice insulted Italy. Now forgive us, motherland. Yeah. So it starts off with the maxims of Baloo. And we start off with his education, which has a lot to do with learning how to stay alive in the jungle and learning how to speak all the different languages of all the different animals again. So just like in the last story, I'm struck with the idea of Mowgli as sort of an Adam figure pre fall, because Adam could speak to all the different kinds of animals. And here he's. He's learned. He's learned the different things. And of course, he's have to learn how to hunt. But I love that greeting. You know, I. You and I are of the same blood. We're brothers. Don't. Don't hurt me.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. We have to respect each other's respective spheres of influence, turf, whatever you want to call it.

[Angelina Stanford]

And. And then right off the bat, they're talking about the danger here, right? So. But think how small he is, said the black panther, who would have spoiled Mowgli if he had had his own way. How can his little head carry all thy long talk? Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed? No. That is why I teach him these things. And that is why I hit him very softly when he forgets. So.

[Thomas Banks]

And when Lou says he hits him very softly, we're meant to understand that this is kind of a relative term.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, just later, when the panther gives him a love.

[Thomas Banks]

You love tap.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Not consensus. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

It was interesting that the panther is the one worried about Mowgli. Mowgli. Mowgli. Now, it's true.

[Angelina Stanford]

They're almost a little bit. I mean, dare I say it, a little bit like mother and father. Right. Where the mom's like, you're too rough on him. I just want to spoil him. You're being too hard on him and the bear. No, I'm trying to keep him alive.

[Thomas Banks]

It is so British, though, so I should say maybe so 19th century British, that it's assumed that if a kid is going to learn anything, you have to beat him, you know, a little bit.

[Angelina Stanford]

This isn't a gentle parent.

[Thomas Banks]

No, no, of course not. Of course not.

[Angelina Stanford]

But there's real danger here. They're trying to keep him alive.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Later is like, critical of. Just like that he was. He's saying he's not prepared. You know, he's like, well, one minute I'm telling you to loosen up, and the next minute I'm criticizing you for not preparing him.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because once he gets into real danger, he freaks out, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, the idea that Mowgli has foster parents, we saw that in the first one, and I think in the first story, and I think in this story, too, the panther and the bear also take on a role as. As foster parents here, preparing him for life and. And for this danger. And. And the language.

[Thomas Banks]

It is interesting that basically all the different animals have their place and their, I guess, certain measure of respect with their, you know, Fellow animals, you know, the birds and the beasts all seem to understand each other fairly well, except for the monkeys. The monkeys are sort of. They do not have a cast here.

[Angelina Stanford]

They do not obey the law of.

[Thomas Banks]

The king, and they don't have a king. Another big difference, because in the movie, if you remember the Louis Prima, King Louie character. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

I guess Kipling's saying they're the Americans then, right?

[Thomas Banks]

Exactly. The monkeys are obviously us.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, well, you know. Yeah. The law of the jungle and having proper order and everybody knowing their place in it for a harmonious existence seems to be a very big deal in this story. And the monkeys are.

[Thomas Banks]

They don't get that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, they can't. They're chaotic, they're silly, they're disordered. They.

[Thomas Banks]

And I appreciate that because I. I'm one of these people who has a. Just a lifelong. I don't like monkeys. I never have. I've never found them, anything about them.

[Angelina Stanford]

I can attest to this. If you were reading the story over coffee, you stopped and just thought you just gave me like a full on rant against monkeys.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, yeah, I was. It reminded me I was reading a memoir by an American journalist last year, I think, and he had worked as a foreign correspondent on a New Delhi paper years ago, and he had a story that, I guess in some Indian cities, like, monkeys are just kind of part of the landscape. You don't have to go into the jungle to find them. They're just kind of wandering around the streets in some places. And he said, you have to be kind of careful when you carry food with you, you know, what times of day. Because sometimes, like, it's just a tribe of these things. Will. Yeah. And he said once he was carrying some kebabs back to his home from a takeout vendor, and all of a sudden he heard this shrieking and he was being pursued by monkeys on the streets. Something that happens. And this wasn't necessarily an unusual occurrence. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so what Kipling is describing here is something.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah, like monkeys can be kind of violent and. Yeah. And unpredictably.

[Angelina Stanford]

So that was one of the interesting things to me, how quickly they went from, we're playful and cute and we're just having fun. Now you can die pretty much.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

But okay, before we look at the monkeys, though, then he learns the snake language. And so Bagheera is kind of quizzing him. And so Mowgli answers, and the answer was a perfectly indescribable hiss. Okay. Now I'm about to say something and I have no Proof for it. But I found myself wondering if J.K. rowling had read the Jungle Book and if this was an influence on Parseltongue, Harry's ability to talk to snakes. And it's. It's a hissing.

[Thomas Banks]

Also there's a Greek myth, Melampus, if you know that one. So Melampus, I think he was lying asleep in a. The cool of the. You know, the. The forest one day and two snakes licked his ears clean so that he could understand the tongue of all manner of beasts and birds.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's gross.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I know. It's kind of. I don't like the idea either. Don't try this at home.

[Angelina Stanford]

But he doesn't speak it. And here Mowgli speaks it, which is what Harry Potter does. And this of course, is going to end up saving his.

[Thomas Banks]

Cindy mentioned another book, I think yesterday, Stalky and Company.

[Angelina Stanford]

Is that another Kipling?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, that's his school story. Very influential one. And that's kind of the. I'm not going to say the best, but sort of like what you think about the prototypical story of kids getting into hijinks and stealing food and making fun of the headmaster and teachers behind their backs. And I know that that was one of the best selling school stories of that, you know, that particular cultural moment. And it would surprise me if she didn't know that one.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'd be surprised too. I'd be surprised if any English writer doesn't know.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Especially if they were educated in England. All right, so, okay, so they talk about the monkeys and he just. He. So, yeah, because we get quite a.

[Cindy Rollins]

Way into the story before Ka appears.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly, exactly. So they find out that Mowgli has been playing with the monkeys and they're very upset about it. Thou hast been. Again, that formal language. Thou hast been with the monkey people. The gray apes, the people without a law. The eaters of everything. The people without a law. That's a big deal.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

There's no law. And so hurt my head. I went. He went sulking and the monkeys gave him. They taught him, as we would say.

[Thomas Banks]

This was another moment where I expected some more exotic meaning and there wasn't one. Bandar log in Hindi is simply monkey people.

[Cindy Rollins]

Like Bander Snap. Well, is. I wonder if Bandersnatch thing comes from monkey kind of H. That's. I mean, that's. What's that? Lewis Carroll.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I wouldn't be surprised. Lewis Carroll really knew languages. Really? Well, he knew a lot of languages and he tried. He was very deliberately trying to bring Eastern stuff into the Western literary tradition. So I wouldn't.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, well, then, of course, yeah, we've. We've solved it. Scholars.

[Angelina Stanford]

Get my Alice Scholar on the horn. Okay, so then Baloo warns him. Right. No, no, no. Stay away from them. They're so bad. Again, I would like to hear you read Jungle Book. Read this paragraph, because this is when he's talking about the bears, talking about what's wrong with the monkeys.

[Thomas Banks]

Listen, man cub, said the bear, and his voice rumbled like thunder on a hot night. I have taught thee all the law of the Jungle. For all the peoples of the jungle except the monkey folk who live in the trees, they have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen and peep and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle. But the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. We of the jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys drink. We do not go where the monkeys go. We do not hunt where they hunt. We do not die where they die. Hast thou ever heard me speak of the Bandar log till to day? No, said Mowgli in a whisper, for the forest was very still now Baloo had finished. The jungle people put them out of their mouths and out of their mind. They are very many. Evil, dirty, shameless. And they desire, if they have any fixed desire, to be noticed by the jungle people. But we do not notice them even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads. I was about to say this sounds like TikTok so much.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was gonna say.

[Thomas Banks]

I was about to say social media.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm gonna start a social media app.

[Thomas Banks]

Called Banderlog and you'll have 500,000 followers tomorrow.

[Angelina Stanford]

And the front page is going to say Bander Login.

[Thomas Banks]

Can I say that was not your best.

[Angelina Stanford]

Still my money making idea here. So as soon as he says that, a shower of nuts and twigs gets rained down on him and he says, the monkey people are forbidden. Forbidden to the jungle people, remember? All right, so what we have, though, because remember, beast fables are not telling us something about animals. And you, if you're reading them that way, you're telling us about people.

[Thomas Banks]

I found someone who complained about this story. Of course, I don't remember where they live or even what their name was. But they said that it seems that Kipling was unaware that monkeys do not regularly kidnap children. Oh, really? No, do tell, do tell. Because obviously he was trying to write a zoology textbook here.

[Angelina Stanford]

So the thing, the thing that we get so confused about is not understanding that these mythic stories, fable stories, fairy stories, they're written very, very allegorically. And so what you have here I can see is he's pitting law and lawlessness and the education of Mowgli, then is. Is between being lawful and being lawless. Right. Which is. That's everybody. And then. And he's going to show us that there's dangers that come from lawlessness and.

[Thomas Banks]

That juxtaposition of human qualities is everywhere in Kipling's fiction and his poetry and pretty much every side of his writings.

[Angelina Stanford]

I like that kind of thing.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I mean, he describes him as a people who have no law and remembrance and basically live from moment to moment to entertain themselves. And that's kind of Harvey at the beginning of Captain's Courageous. I mean, I know it's been a million years since you've read that one, but he's the spoiled rich kid who just kind of insults everyone. Doesn't have any. Also the first thing you notice about him, he doesn't have any respect for the adults around him at all. And. Yeah, lives for stupid amusements. And then he falls off a ship and has to learn how to be an adult in the real world and work for a living. So it's kind of how he ceases to be a monkey and becomes a man.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, that's exactly right.

[Cindy Rollins]

We could also call him Eustace Scrub there.

[Thomas Banks]

That also.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes, the same kind of thing.

[Thomas Banks]

To Scrub, I could imagine.

[Angelina Stanford]

And the monkeys, their lawlessness is very, well, self destructive in this story. And. But there are smaller versions of it all through the way. Like they go out, they can't even hunt because they get distracted. They can't even bring back food.

[Thomas Banks]

They can steal things. They're good at that. But that's kind of where the moment.

[Angelina Stanford]

To moment and the fact that they live in. Well, we. I guess I should wait till we get to that part. But an abandoned ruin that seemed very.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, something that some actual great king built a long time ago, which has fallen to, you know, fallen into rot and decay and decrepitude. And now the monkeys have occupied it. Sort of, I don't know, sort of like scavengers.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so we also find out that the reason that the monkeys are interested in him at all is because they think that he can teach them how to make some little huts so they can't do anything themselves. But maybe he can.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, he's a human. He must know about architecture.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so I guess this is true. Mowgli, as a woodcutter's child, inherited all sorts of instincts, so that's the first time we heard anything about his past there. Either that or they just assume he's a human so he knows how to build things. Which if they kidnapped me or you. Jokes on them. Yeah, we could help them write some poems and analyze some stories, but we could not help them build it.

[Thomas Banks]

You help them understand the story they're in better. And he particularly, you know, undignified roles that they play in it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, let me ask y' all a question. Do you ever buy, like, IKEA furniture or furniture that you have to put together?

[Thomas Banks]

We did that once. It almost destroyed our marriage. No, I think we did. I don't think we were more confused by the instructions than most people are.

[Angelina Stanford]

We had some IKEA bookcases in our very first apartment, the honeymoon cottage. And we put them together right after we got back from the honeymoon. It was like our first. Mariel and I thought, this is the best of our marriage. This is it. And we survived. We're still married.

[Thomas Banks]

It was fine. It was fine.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think it was fine. But really, it's fine.

[Cindy Rollins]

Really. When you're doing that, it's always, you know, but if you stayed together, then it was a good success.

[Angelina Stanford]

And we still have bookcases, so it's like a win win right there. It's a win win. And no, but if there was a zombie apocalypse, probably. We are not who she. You should come running for when the apocalypse is over and you want to rebuild the situation, that's when. That's when we step in.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Yeah. We. We don't have like a ready made arsenal or, you know, you know, fortified crawl space or anything like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Children. And I know exactly which one I would run to in the apocalypse. Cindy, you have a kid. Is there an instant kid that came near my. I would go to his house.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I have a kid in an address where I'm supposed to show up if there's a.

[Angelina Stanford]

See, it's not even theoretical for her. He's got a panic room and she's got a code to get. She's laughing because it's probably true. Exactly which kid it is. And I'm not gonna say thank you.

[Thomas Banks]

You know, I used to scoff at panic room as I grow older.

[Angelina Stanford]

Can I also get that address.

[Thomas Banks]

But as I grow older and the world makes less sense to me, this sort of. Of start to. I see the. The appeal of them.

[Angelina Stanford]

I guess if we had a panic room, I mean, given how it is today, we might be in it all the time.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, that's the problem. There's been a lot of panics, you know, a lot of. A lot of. You know, this might be the big time.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. We're having too much fun here. Okay, so let's see. I lost my place in the story. What happens next? Okay, so then.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, yeah, they go to. He takes a nap.

[Angelina Stanford]

He gets kidnapped.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And I think it's interesting because he feels guilty in the end because he didn't believe them, for one thing. But in. In this part of the story, he doesn't really do anything. He doesn't go, like, disobey them and run off into the forest. But he's already developed a relationship with them, and it comes back to bite him.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. And that. It was really interesting to me at the end that he. He took the blame for it. He's like, no, this is. He didn't say. You never told me. He said, this was my fault. I established a relationship with him and got. So they kidnap him.

[Thomas Banks]

Once again, I think Mowgli proves himself to be less annoying than he would be if he were a character in a contemporary YA novel. He has a sense of responsibility.

[Angelina Stanford]

He's very stoic. Yeah, he's a little kid, but he's like, no, this is my responsibility. I have erred. There's something almost Spartan about him.

[Thomas Banks]

Him? Kind of. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

I. I love reading mythology, and I didn't realize that the Jungle Book was going to be written like this. I. I like that it's written in this very high mythic style. I think this is just fantastic. Okay. So once again, though, we see that he keeps his wits about him. He's. He's a. A smart kid. And so we know he's less than 10.

[Thomas Banks]

For a time, he was afraid of being dropped. Then he grew angry, but knew better than to struggle. And he then began to think. The first thing was to send back word to Baloo and Bagheera. For at the pace the monkeys were going, he knew his friends would be left far behind. It was useless to look down, for he could only see the top sides of the branches. So he stared upward and saw. Far away in the blue ran the kite, balancing and wheeling as he kept watch over the jungle, waiting for things to die hard. Ran, saw that the monkeys were carrying something. And dropped a few hundred yards to find out whether their load was good to eat. He whistled with surprise when he saw Mowgli being dragged up a treetop. And the branches closed over the boy. No, excuse me. And heard him give the kite call. For we be of one blood, thou and I. The waves of the branches closed over the boy, but ran balanced away to the next tree in time to see the little brown face come up again. Mark my trail. Mowgli shouted. Tell Baloo of the Sioni pack and Bagheera of the Council Rock, in whose.

[Angelina Stanford]

Name, brother, I love that. Mowgli the frog. Man cub, they call me. Mark my trail. I was so impressed that he kept him.

[Thomas Banks]

I was thinking, like, actually, in a way, I think he's. But the two books are written maybe 10 years apart. He and Jim Hawkins have something in common. I mean, neither of them is like a really strong character, but they're resourceful, and they keep their wits together when it's necessary to do so.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I could see that. Are Kipling and Stevenson contemporaries?

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. So Stevenson would have been a little bit. Actually, Stevenson would have died the year that this book was written and published. Okay. Yes. Stevenson's a young man still. When he dies, he was 38, 39, I think, maybe 40. But I. I know that he really enjoyed Kipling's first couple of books. And I was reading some of Stevenson's letters to Henry James years ago, and he says, have you marked this. This newcomer, Kipling, I feel he is too gifted to live. Oh, so I'm too gifted to live.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, so he was gonna die like Stevenson. Yeah. But he lived how? He probably was quite old when he died. How.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, Kipling lives into the 1930s. So, yeah, he's. He's an old man when he dies.

[Angelina Stanford]

What's interesting here is that what seems at the beginning almost like a little bit of a throwaway, that his whole education has been learning the language of these other animals and learning how to say this phrase. It saves him here. And then, of course, at the end. Again at the end. So his. Again, this sort of pre. Pre fall Eden. He can communicate with all of the animals, and that's how he's able to get. To get help there. I thought, this is just. This is such a cool story. All right, so he gets taken off. Meanwhile, Baloo and Bagheera are falling apart.

[Thomas Banks]

Meanwhile, Baloo and Bagheera were furious with rage and grief. Bagheera climbed as he had never climbed before. But the thin branches Broke beneath his weight, and he slipped down his. His claws full of bark. Why didst thou not warn the man cub? He roared to poor Baloo, who had set off at a clumsy trot in the hope of overtaking the monkeys. What was the use of half slaying him with blows if thou didst not warn him? Haste, oh, haste. We may yet catch them up. Baloo panted, all right, so if we.

[Angelina Stanford]

Look at this as types again, the idea of the education, you know, are you teaching them the law? Are you teaching them lawlessness? And Bagheera being that, hey, why are you so hard on him? But then the second something goes wrong, just like Cindy said, it's like, this is your fault. Why didn't you. Why didn't you protect him for every possible thing that could go wrong? Why did you never think to tell him not to take candy from strangers or, you know, any of the things we forgot about? And Baloo is a big fat bear, and he's slow, and he can't.

[Thomas Banks]

It's not even his fault.

[Angelina Stanford]

So, yeah, I didn't expect the story to be like that. So they're trying. They're running, and they're like, okay, we can't. We can't chase them. What are we going to do? And then they put their heads together and realize, let's go get the help of the one animal that the monkeys are.

[Thomas Banks]

The guy that you don't really want to have to call upon, but who's sometimes necessary.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And that you're not really sure you can trust.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. So as they're walking over there, Baloo says, you have to be careful because he just shed his skin and he can't see very well. So I think that's really significant that they meet him and he's just shed his skin. So the thing about serpents in folklore and symbolism and allegory and all of that.

[Thomas Banks]

I think I know where you're going and. But run with this, and let me see if I.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. Well, I've got two different directions my brain's going at the same time, and that's why I'm stumbling over my words. On the one hand, snakes are very consistently portrayed as cunning and sly and dangerous and tricky and devilish. That's right.

[Thomas Banks]

Essentially.

[Angelina Stanford]

But they also have a flip side. It's. So it's not, you know, symbols don't work that. It's. Every time you see a snake, it's bad. You always have to let the context of the story tell you how to interpret it. But snakes also can be images of rebirth because they shed their skin. And so in Western literature, they're often a Christ figure, even with, like, Moses holding up the serpent. And everybody looks on the surface, which.

[Thomas Banks]

Christ in the Gospel of John actually.

[Angelina Stanford]

Points back and says, that's me. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

So.

[Angelina Stanford]

So serpents can be. Yes, in the Garden of Eden, they can be, you know, symbols of Satan.

[Thomas Banks]

Kind of like lions. Lions. So can be a symbol of the devil or symbol of Christ.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, exactly. They're. Yes, exactly. And so. Yes, so. So serpents can be Christ images. And so if Kipling is pulling from those Buddhist tales of rebirth, I'm sure, again, I'm just guessing here, but I. I think it's a safe guess. There's going to be a lot of snake imagery in there because snakes are symbols of fertility and rebirth as well as being very, very dangerous.

[Thomas Banks]

Something you don't want to get too close to.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, So I think you see both of those because he is about, of course, to.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, save Mowgli.

[Angelina Stanford]

Give Mowgli a second life.

[Thomas Banks]

Also. Also, at one point he tells them, you know, I might eat you at some point. Just be forewarned. Forewarned is forearmed there.

[Cindy Rollins]

But this conversation is hilarious. I mean, it's such a fun conversation between them.

[Angelina Stanford]

The dialogue is fantastic. I'm just delighting about everything here. I'm just like, a little bit. I could.

[Thomas Banks]

Has had past business with the monkeys, and he doesn't like them any more than anyone else does. So this is. You know, they all have sort of common cause against them because the monkeys have insulted. Cause, dignity.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he.

[Cindy Rollins]

And Bagheera skillfully brings that forward.

[Angelina Stanford]

Kind of pushes his buttons there a little bit. And so he. We find out that he has not eaten in a while, so he's very hungry and he's just shed his skin. And so he. He needs food. And so they promise him food. So we also find out what he is. He's a python.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. So a stink that's not poisonous, but squeezes its prey to death.

[Angelina Stanford]

Death, yes.

[Thomas Banks]

What does he say? It's hug. His deadliness was in his hug.

[Angelina Stanford]

It was in his hug. Which is an interesting counterpoint to the love taps of the panther and. And the bear. Again, that. That very fine line in the jungle between danger and love and affection, death and life and. And all that. All that you see there. No, when we got to the end, he was, like, knocking down rocks with his head. I had no idea pythons were like that. That was amazing.

[Thomas Banks]

You know, it was around this time that there was Some sort of craze amongst big game hunters for anacondas and you know, big snakes like that. And I think it was Theodore Roosevelt offered a personal reward. And Roosevelt went on at least one or two hunting trips to South America, but he offered a reward to anyone who could capture a anaconda that was above 25 or 30ft or something like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

So.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, anyway.

[Angelina Stanford]

Are there python hunters?

[Thomas Banks]

I'm sure there must be.

[Angelina Stanford]

There must be.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

I come from the land of water moccasins, so I don't know about these pythons.

[Cindy Rollins]

Isn't it? Isn't there other. There was a problem in Florida for a while where people would buy pet snakes and then they.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, and they were flushing them down the toilet.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And then they were. Yeah. Getting in people's houses or under their house.

[Thomas Banks]

Florida is a beautiful state. I, I know you're from there, but yeah, the animals, the animals. I think like, yeah, the animals in Florida that, I don't know, I meant it might need a braver man than I to deal with that.

[Cindy Rollins]

The bugs are pretty bad.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. So they managed to, they decide, let's go. And so they end up leaving the bear behind because he's slow. And the panther and the snake, although I don't know how snake moves fast, but there you go. And they're on the trail and then they meet up with the bird who says, here's where he is. Go, go get him. And so then we switch over to Mowgli and he's in the deserted city and we find out that this is, this is a place where the jungle people do not go.

[Thomas Banks]

Cold layers. Yes, yes. Few of the jungle people ever went there because what they called the cold layers was an old deserted city lost and buried in the jungle. And beasts seldom use a place that men have once used the wired. The wild boar will, but the hunting tribes do not. Besides, the monkeys lived there as much as they could be said to live anywhere. And no self respecting animal would come within eye shot in except. And except in times of drought when the half ruined tanks and reservoirs held a little water.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so they're running now. We switch, of course. Kaz saying, I'm hungry, I'm hungry. And I, I love every time he's like, besides, they call me a speckled frog. And Bagheera's like, like, what was a worm? Earthworm. Yellow. It was also yellow.

[Thomas Banks]

Worse than that. They give you an even worse insult.

[Angelina Stanford]

I love that he can't remember what the insult is. And he's like they call me something. I'm really mad.

[Thomas Banks]

All one let us go on. And Carl seemed to pour himself along the ground, finding the shortest road with his steady eyes and keeping to it.

[Angelina Stanford]

I say, I'm not one who's a big sucker for good description, as, you know, like, usually that, but.

[Thomas Banks]

But that was a very good description of a snake moving. That's kind of a liquid cult quality. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

There's a. I marked it. There's. In a few pages. There's another line too, of when he's coiling and uncoiling himself, the way he kind of spilled out. It's very, very well, well described. Just delightful. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Actually, C. S Lewis makes the point in that essay that what he considered maybe a defect in Kipling's writing is that it's almost too good.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right.

[Thomas Banks]

And that he sometimes feels like he edited to the point of too much perfection.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yep, yep.

[Thomas Banks]

And you want him. You want to see him, like, let his guard down every once in a while, but he never does.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then he goes on to say, it's only the kind of flaw that could be in a great artist.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, exactly. So.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so then, yeah, he's living in a ruin and Mowgli's like, I need food.

[Thomas Banks]

But the monkeys are just having the time of their lives. And that's the thing.

[Angelina Stanford]

They're always like, he's not having the time of his life.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Life for them is sort of the one long party that never ends.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm going to say this because it's on the tip of my tongue, then people can yell at me later. But it's not exactly the same thing because the monkeys definitely represent lawlessness and a lawlessness that's into danger, but at the same time, am I alone here in that they feel a little bit like the elves in the Hobbit. So the, the, the. The. They're in the, the. The tree Elves and the Hobbit. They're. They're up there and they're.

[Thomas Banks]

I wouldn't have thought of that.

[Angelina Stanford]

They're. They're laughing and they're playing tricks. Tolkien actually regretted how he made them in the Hobbit because they're much more serious in the Lord of the Rings, but they're, like, riddling and joking and everything's just frivolous and laughter. But then they can be very dangerous.

[Thomas Banks]

Kind of an eternal present without any regard to the future of the past.

[Angelina Stanford]

Something like that. He changed.

[Thomas Banks]

I haven't read the Hobbit in a really long time.

[Angelina Stanford]

He did. They're much More severe in Lord of the Rings. And he said that he regretted making them as playful as he did in the Hobbit. But I just. I just keep.

[Thomas Banks]

But no, I like this.

[Cindy Rollins]

The first scene in the Hobbit, they're very much like that. They're just having a great time.

[Thomas Banks]

Then they fought over it, and then they would all rush together in mobs and shout, there is no one in the jungle so wise and good and clever and strong and gentle as the band or log. Then all would begin again till they grew tired of the city and went back to the treetops, hoping the jungle people would notice them. Mowgli, who was trained under the law of the jungle, did not like or understand this kind of life. The monkeys dragged him into the cold lairs late in the afternoon. And instead of going to sleep, as Mowgli would have done after a long journey, they joined hands and danced about and sang their foolish songs. One of the monkeys made a speech and told his companions that Mowgli's capture marked a new thing in the history of the Bandar log, for Mowgli was going to show them how to weave the sticks and canes together as a protection against rain and cold. Mowgli picked up some creepers and began to work them in and out, and the monkeys tried to imitate, but in a few moments they lost interest and began to pull their friends tails or jump up and down on all fours.

[Angelina Stanford]

Coughing, I wish to eat. I am a stranger in this part of the jungle. Bring me food or give me leave to hunt here. So he's basically appealing to the law of the jungle, right? And they're just like, ah, ah. And they give him a few nuts and then. But they get distracted and they drop them and, oh, well, mouth. And that's when he realizes that Baloo is right. All that Baloo has said about the Bandar log is true.

[Thomas Banks]

He thought to himself, they had ADHD before it was cool.

[Angelina Stanford]

They have no law, no hunting call and no leaders. Nothing but foolish words and little picking thievish hands. So if I am starved or killed here, it will be my own fault. So he gets into real danger. Oh, oh. That's where he says, yeah, they have the madness.

[Thomas Banks]

Certainly. This is Duani, the madness. Yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

In the first story, they contrasted madness with the law.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, that's right. Then they compare him with the. The jackal again.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah. Well, he says, did the jackal bite him? They seem to have the madness on him. All right. So they're getting closer and they show up and the monkeys kind of fling him. There was only one here. Kill him. Kill him.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So there they see. Okay, wait. They see Bagheera first. So they fling Mowgli down, who, fortunately, had been trained as a bear cub and knew how to fall so he doesn't get hurt. But he would have gotten hurt if he had just been a regular boy. And they just start wailing on Bakira. Stay there. Shouted the monkeys, till we have killed thy friends. And later we will play with thee if the poison people leave they alive. So here we see their dangerous play. They throw him in a cobra pit. But Mowgli's quick thinking. He knows how to.

[Thomas Banks]

He knows how to talk with snakes.

[Angelina Stanford]

We be of one blood, ye. And I said Mowgli quickly giving the snakes call. He could hear rustling and hissing in the rubbish all around him. And gave the call a second time to make sure. And they respond even so. Down, hoods. All stand still, little brother, for thy feet may do us harm. So, yeah, he's saved there. Oh, gosh, this is such a great story. So they fight and fight with Bagheera, and then.

[Thomas Banks]

And there's actual killing involved here, which, once again, I mean, you know, it's. It's a kid's book, but, you know, you can actually have, like, a respectably high body count.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, it's law showing up for lawlessness, right? That's what it's doing.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. It's not. It's not frivolous killing.

[Angelina Stanford]

So Bagheera, he almost comes to his end there, but Mowgli is yelling, get away from them and jump in the water. If you jump in the reservoir, they won't follow you there. So he just barely gets there. And then. So Ka is still working. Bakira's thinking to himself, what is taking the others so long? Why aren't they here yet? And because Ka is uncoiling and coiling himself back. He's like.

[Thomas Banks]

He's methodical. He takes his time.

[Angelina Stanford]

Ready?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he pops up and they all see him. They say, ka.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's Ka.

[Angelina Stanford]

Run. Run. Generations of monkeys had been scared into good behavior by the stories their elders told them of Ka. I love that. All right, so now they've got the fight there. And then Balut did Blue. When did Baloo show up?

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, a little. Little bit ago.

[Angelina Stanford]

A little bit ago. Okay, I had the order wrong there. Okay. So now Baloo's there. So Bagheera is in the water, and he calls out to Mowgli, and Mowgli doesn't like the way his voice sounds. So he obviously got really beat up. And Baloo is just sitting there, batting them away one monkey at a time. But still, he wouldn't have. He wouldn't have survived.

[Thomas Banks]

No. He says. He says I may have cried out in the battle. Bagheera, answered Baloo, art thou hurt? I am not sure that they did not pull me into a hundred little bearlings, said Baloo, gravely shaking one leg after the other there.

[Angelina Stanford]

Wow. I'm sore. Ka. We owe thee, I think, our lives, Bagheera and I. No matter. Where is the manling here in a trap. I cannot climb out, said Mowgli. The curve of the book and dome was above his head. All right, so this is where my little archetypal height heart got really excited because we have our hero of mysterious origin, our child of destiny.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thrown into a snake pit. This is a massive descent into Hades image. Right?

[Thomas Banks]

You knew you were going to do that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Of course. How was I not?

[Thomas Banks]

It was kind of predictable.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is the same image of the knight going in to fight the dragon in the cave. Mowgli's in a snake pit, and the snakes are not biting him. But that is an image.

[Thomas Banks]

I was going to say Daniel in the lion's den.

[Angelina Stanford]

Same. No, exactly. And they're not biting him. And he calls out for help. And so then the snake. This is why it's important that we saw him as an image of rebirth. Earth with the shedded skin. Otherwise we're saying, why is the Satan figure rescuing him? So he comes in and rescues him and he. He, you know, bangs up the rock and Mowgli is able to climb out of the rocks. That's a massive rebirth image there. That's a resurrection image there. He had his death and resurrection. He comes out and. And they're all saying, are you hurt? And they're hugging and everything and. And cause like, oh, so this is the manling. His skin is very soft and I'm pretty hungry. And so not to forget that they're.

[Thomas Banks]

Still has, you know, that. That side of his personality as well.

[Angelina Stanford]

You better be have a care. He says that I don't mistake you for a monkey. And then Mowgli immediately says, we be one blood, thou and I. I take my life from thee tonight. My kill shall be thy kill if ever thou art hungry, O king.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay.

[Thomas Banks]

And he says, I have to read this. This dance scene out also that the dance of the hunger of Ka. He turned twice or thrice in a big circle, weaving his head from right to left. Then he began Making loops and figures of eight with his body in soft, oozy triangles that melted into squares and five sided figures and coiled mounds. Never resting, never hurrying and never stopping his low, humming song. It grew darker and darker until at last the dragging, shifting coils disappeared. But they could hear the rustle of.

[Angelina Stanford]

The scales and interestingly. So he's hypnotizing them, right?

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is what snakes do. They can hypnotize. And he's hypnotizing the monkeys. I love all of that. Do you have my permission to move? We shall not move until you tell us to move. Right. And that's when. And I did not see this coming. Baloo and Bagheera realized they're hypnotized too. But Mowgli's not.

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mowgli's not hypnotized.

[Thomas Banks]

So Mowgli laid his hands on Baloo and Bagheera to get them away. And the two great beasts started as though they had been waked from a dream.

[Angelina Stanford]

Keep thy hand on my shoulder, Bagheera whispered. Keep it there. I must go back. Must go back to Ka. Must go back to Ka. Right. So they were getting hypnotized too. So then Mowgli, in turn saves them. And what a great line. It's only, oh, Ka making circles on the dust.

[Thomas Banks]

Us.

[Angelina Stanford]

Let's go. So he's immune to. To whatever power Ka has. And then they walk away, very much understanding that they would have. What is it Big Era says? If it wasn't for you, Mowgli, I would have just marched right into his mouth. Woof, Said Baloo. But he stood under the still trees again. Nevermore will I make an ally of Ka. And he shook himself all over. That was it. In a little time, had I stayed, I should have walked out his throat. So, yeah, a very, very dangerous alliance there.

[Thomas Banks]

But what was the meaning of it all? Said Mowgli, who did not know anything of a python's powers of fascination. I saw no more than a big snake making foolish circles till the dark came and his nose was all sore. And that is a real folk belief, right? That a. That a certain snakes can hypnotize you?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah. That's all connected to like. Like even in the Hobbit when Don't talk to smog. Because a dragon could hypnotize you and vampires can hypnotize you. So it's all. Yes, it's all connected. So they kind of blow it off and say, it's nothing. We have the man cub again. True. But he has cost us heavily in time which might have been spent in good hunting, in wounds, in hair. I'm half plucked along my back. And last of all, in honor.

[Thomas Banks]

We began with a beating and now we end with another one.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's exactly right.

[Thomas Banks]

Akira gave him half a dozen love taps. From a panther's joint of point of view, they would hardly have waked one of his own cubs, but for a seven year old boy, they amounted to as severe a beating as you could wish to avoid. When it was all over, Mowgli sneezed and picked himself up without a word. Now, said Bagheera, jump on my back, little brother, and we will go home.

[Angelina Stanford]

I love that line. Right, read that one.

[Thomas Banks]

One of the beauties of jungle law is that punishment settles all schools. There is no nagging afterwards.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think that is a great line.

[Cindy Rollins]

I wanted to. That was gonna be my commonplace. I was thinking about that and then I forgot. And then I was looking for the line I loved and I couldn't remember and then there it is. So, such a great line.

[Angelina Stanford]

So, yeah, so you have this.

[Thomas Banks]

That should be a hobby lobby, you know, sort of printed, you know, framed print.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, you could put it on like people did in the olden days. Back in the 80s, we would have put that on a paddle for our kids.

[Thomas Banks]

Punishment settles all scores.

[Cindy Rollins]

Except that we reserved the right to even nag back then.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then the last line, Mowgli laid his head down on Bagheera's back and slept so deeply that he never waked when he was put down in the home cave. So, yes, begins with the beating, ends with the beating. We have had the education of Mowgli and he has had to learn a very hard lesson about what happens when you cross the prohibition, as Tolkien pointed out, and there are consequences. And he's had his death and rebirth moment. I would expect that he's going to be wiser now about the law of the jungle, having been through this, this danger and that great line. One of the beauties of jungle law is that punishment settles all scores. And from what Lewis was saying in that K. Kipling essay, that's kind of a Kipling thing. So, you know, you sort of get licked into a cub, but then after you're. That's almost like an initiation. Right. And after you're in, you're in.

[Thomas Banks]

Right, right. It's a. It's the cost. The cost of belonging in a way.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

And I actually think when we're talking about disciplining children and stuff, there's this. Besides the fact that, yes, nagging is a negative. But there is something. There are some. Some modern parenting techniques verge into pure manipulation all the time. And there's something very clean about this is, you know, you can't do this. This, you know, this is the boundary. This is what you were. This is going to be the punishment or the discipline and that's it. Like, there's no like constant manipulating on the part of the parent.

[Angelina Stanford]

The other thing that strikes me about the law of the jungle is it's not arbitrary.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's going to keep you alive.

[Cindy Rollins]

Exactly. He disobeyed real laws that had real consequences. And. And they bring that out very well.

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, and then that's why he. I think he takes the blame for it. And. And then he has that moment, that great moment. The moment that you cannot manipulate a child into getting to where he says, says, oh, that's what he was talking about.

[Thomas Banks]

They didn't sit down with Mowgli and made him make him write a five paragraph essay on everything he did wrong.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Sign it at the end. Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Or sit down and pull out the book of Proverbs. Make him hate the Bible.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

But, you know, but he walks away from that experience loving Baloo and Bagheera even more.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Loving the law of the jungle. And yes. You were just. You were being tough on me because you were trying to keep me alive. There are real consequences and we see that early on.

[Cindy Rollins]

It was a very poignant moment when they say, you need to. Mowgli is my student. He's my. I'm doing. He's going to be my shining glory. And then Balou says, and we love him very much. And I just. This is a picture of love. Like, what does love look like?

[Thomas Banks]

This is good though.

[Angelina Stanford]

This.

[Thomas Banks]

I like this one a lot.

[Angelina Stanford]

I did not expect the story to be like this. This was so good.

[Thomas Banks]

I thought you would like these.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, well. Well chosen.

[Thomas Banks]

We're redeeming Kipling.

[Angelina Stanford]

You are. I wish we. I. Everything in me is like, why didn't they give us this to read in the eighth grade?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

I would have eaten. This would have been.

[Thomas Banks]

This is an. This is an easier enter entry into Kipling territory than Cat Captain's Courageous.

[Angelina Stanford]

Maybe one day I'll give Captain's Courageous a try. But Cindy, thanks for saying the thing about the audiobook. I'm gonna get that and yeah, you'll love it. Listening to it, I can see a great narrator would be perfect for a book.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, he does a really good job on this. I mean he. The voices the intonation of Ka and Baloo. He. He does a great job.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, well, I'm really enjoying this. Thank, thanks both of you. Any final comments?

[Cindy Rollins]

Sense.

[Thomas Banks]

None at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

Cindy?

[Cindy Rollins]

No, I'm, I'm good. It was a lot of fun to be back.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's very fun to have you back. But I was going to tease you that you don't want to turn this story into like a five step parenting system that you're going to market.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, yeah. This would be the perfect discipline manual. We can, if we could get the workbook, you know, have the. We could have a study guide and a workbook and then we would have the best. We would have what I've seen advertised, a foolproof way of raising your children to be good.

[Angelina Stanford]

But don't forget the discussion component.

[Thomas Banks]

We would have our new and improved law of the jungle.

[Angelina Stanford]

We have to say something like, and what would you do if some monkeys kidnapped you in the jungle?

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Would you be able to talk to the birds?

[Cindy Rollins]

And have you been paying attention during Latin lesson? Or have you?

[Angelina Stanford]

And this is what happens, boys and girls. But that's okay. All joking aside, there is a moral in this story.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not hit over the head beast. Fables have morals. There's no question about them. That's how fables work. And there is a moral here, but it's not spelled out.

[Cindy Rollins]

And this is a good chance for us to remind our listeners that we should not spell it out like we're talking. And we're spelling it out here because we're talking about the book. But when we're reading this to our children, the worst thing we could do is say, that is why I want you always to listen to me.

[Angelina Stanford]

And that is the temptation. That is the temptation you're gonna have.

[Cindy Rollins]

You will have to sit on your hands and stop yourself from shaking, but you will have. I mean, I didn't do that so many times. I'm telling you, as a failure in that area who had to learn the hard way.

[Angelina Stanford]

I learned it from you. Yeah. I learned it from watching you. I'm turning 80s.

[Cindy Rollins]

Look at that failure. Whoa.

[Angelina Stanford]

What is she. Remember when I first started doing morning time? I had. I had what I affectionately called to myself, my Monday morning sermon. Yeah. And you talked to me about that and I was like, listen, I relate to you.

[Cindy Rollins]

My favorite part of the week.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. If y' all listen to us sometimes. And you're like, I just don't understand why they're always telling me not to preach to my kids. I had that moment where I was Actually annoyed with Cindy. I was like, what. What do you. What does she mean? I have to stop doing my Monday. This is.

[Thomas Banks]

I look forward.

[Angelina Stanford]

I look forward to this all. All week.

[Thomas Banks]

Week.

[Angelina Stanford]

Cindy, when I break down the sermon that we had heard on Sunday and we started off our week. Oh, man, I was a mess. I was a mess. But you broke me of that. And it was so good. And my kids were so sweet and obedient, and they sat there while I just went on and on and they nodded and they told me what I wanted to say. I know your face right now because.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, I'm just feeling guilty because.

[Angelina Stanford]

God bless young Angelina. I didn't know.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, I did the same thing like your poor kids.

[Angelina Stanford]

So, yeah, if you're annoyed with us. Well, we. We were there with you. We were there with you. And. And that's it. You have to just let the child sit in the story. Trust the story. The moral of the story will get into your child's imagination and heart. You don't just like Cindy said, just with everything you've got and you resist at the end of the story saying. And that's why you should always listen when Mama tells you not to run with lawless kids.

[Cindy Rollins]

And. And. And then the second thing you're going to do if you. Okay, you're not going to say anything.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thing.

[Cindy Rollins]

You can't stare hard at one child.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. Right, Billy? Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And you can't start calling certain kids in the neighborhood the Banderlogs.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. You know, now, hey, let's not go that far. If we couldn't call people the names.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, we had one. One kid in my. We're just gonna go on and on. Cindy and I are just catching up here. But I had one kid that. After we read the Silver Chair, I kept calling him Puddleglom. And I'd be. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Stop being a puddle Glum.

[Thomas Banks]

That's funny.

[Cindy Rollins]

I love that when you do that, it takes the edge off. It's. It's not as. I love that, you know, those. Those tropes that we have, we can tell people about. I mean, tell. Let our. You know, use them as. You know, we all love Puddleglom. I mean, if we didn't love him, maybe we shouldn't say that.

[Angelina Stanford]

It. No. P. Was very lovable. And. Yeah, it was. It was a gentle, teasing thing. I didn't turn it into a whole lesson. But yeah. So the point is, yes, Beast fables have morals, and he's not spelling it out. And you don't need to spell it out. Just let the story work. Honestly, there's nothing you can say that's going to be more powerful than the image of Mowgli almost dying.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, just let your child feed on that.

[Cindy Rollins]

And it's a powerful story.

[Angelina Stanford]

It really is. I'm just so shocked and delighted. So I'm. I'm excited. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Banks, for getting me to read this.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, my pleasure.

[Angelina Stanford]

We have one more week, which I.

[Thomas Banks]

Just knew you needed a nudge.

[Angelina Stanford]

I did. I needed the right nudge. No reading comprehension sheet. So we have one more week with Cindy and we have one more week with Kipling. So join us next time for Tiger Tiger here as we finish up our series on Kipling's the Jungle Book. And again, you go to morningtimeform moms.com to find out about Cindy's back to school conference and go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find out about our summer classes. And of course, you can go to Literary life. Backslash. No patreon.com backslash Literary life to join our Patreon. If you would like to support this podcast, we are 100 member supported and we have a fantastic community of patrons. We also have an exclusive Patreon forum where we talk about all this good stuff all the time. We've got reading groups going and all kind of great stuff. So until next time, gang, stick around to the end because Mr. Banks will have a special poem. Is this one going to be Kipling?

[Thomas Banks]

It will not. Actually. I will get an actual Kipling.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, at the end. Okay. Oh, I see. You're cheesing us. Okay, so stay tuned for another not poem by Kipling and we'll see you next week. So until then, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

My Heart Leaps up by William Wordsworth. My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky so was it when my life began so is it now I am a man so be it when I shall grow old or let me die the child is father of the man and I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.