I feel we're still talking around the main theme, though. Nothing is simple in a human world, and it's good to approach any given topic from different angles.
I don't remember reading the Kalevala, and I need to check it out to know for sure. Many of my childhood books originated in Europe. My favorite book was The Chronicles of Narnia, and I got my foundation laid from its basic tenets. It's basically a Bible for the young. I think that I had a pretty broad exposure to world literature growing up in the 90s. The internet made most of the youth short-sighted, contrary to its promises.
IKEA sourced its wood from Karelia for a long time. Only now, given the current geopolitical situation, it's easy to see how global we were just a few years back. I've posted in another thread about Chernobyl and how nature restored itself in less than 40 years after the disaster. There is hope, and life always prevails. What we need to work on is human attitude and understanding. Strangely enough, I have much more hope for the future nowadays. Most likely I won't be able to see a bigger change in my lifetime, but it's on the horizon.
Well, thanks for normalizing our exchange in the context of this thread. I have a tendency to get interested in tangential sub-topics, which can steer threads far outside of their original realm of focus.
I also loved reading The Chronicles of Narnia in the (early) 90’s. They were some of the first books that I read, in English or otherwise, and I loved them so much that I read one after another. While I’m not sure if I picked up on the deeper meaning of those books, I think that I was probably impacted by their general message in a positive way, which I think is good enough.
A year or two after reading the Narnia series, I read The Neverending Story, and loved it even more. By that point, I was able to discern that some deeper themes were being conveyed, but not the maturity to fully understand them.
Recently, I listened to an episode of the Popcorn Psychology podcast (in which the hosts, who are mental health professionals, psychoanalyze different movies), which was all about the movie version of The Neverending Story. According to their analysis, which rang true to me,
the nothing symbolizes the sorrow/depression that can overtake us, while
Falcor the Luck Dragon symbolizes the openness and vitality of life-force energy that can help us stay upright and buoyant, while keeping the faith, and riding the winds of life.