Well, it is time to return to the significant origins of the Unexamined Life. I have abandoned none of my hopes for final participation, but the fact that it is a matter of consensus has been borne in on me with all the gentleness of moderate speed. I wonder if now that I’m busy in the world and more and more obliged to behave as a responsible, if not altogether consenting, adult, something of broader scope is not perhaps in order?
* * *
The interesting question arose about the reason behind the modern neglect of a work such as The Wind in the Willows. The answer that most readily springs to my mind is the Rat’s penchant for collecting weaponry, guns in particular. He is rather quick to brandish them, and to effete, modern sensibilities, his cache on the eve of the storming of Toad Hall must border on appalling. A book for Children? With jokes involving deadly weapons? A nightmareous orgy of violence only appropriate for teenagers, were it not for all the missing sex. And that suggests another fault of the book: the complete lack of mating, or even of significant female personages. In short, The Wind in the Willows is catastrophically dated.
Do any of us really regret that the people who aren’t reading this book aren’t reading it?
* * *
I believe the centenary last year involved some annotated editions, however. Not sure who would really go for annotations of beloved classics not of the remote past, but it does mean readers.
* * *
“Contrary to the impression held by some, facts never speak for themselves, and a collection of facts is no more a story than a pile of bricks a house.” –Richard Weaver
With which he shows, in a clear, striking way, how one is to think about such things. It is as simple as finding the right simile, but that, as most of us know, is hard to do.
* * *
I also read recently a statement by C.S. Lewis—how convenient Lewis is for so many things—in which he told T.S. Eliot that he did not dare venture an opinion on the Albigensians, having become an ex-medievalist. He said that to venture an opinion would require several months of hard work. Lewis forbore because he knew, he had known, and he lacked the time. It shows the freedom of being a limited creature.
* * *
We know those things about which we can be certain, and we know those things about which we must become certain, but we also know there are things about which we may never without time and inclination venture so much as to have an opinion.
* * *
Which reminds me that The Wind in the Willows provides is a vision of life in which only the most common sort of heroism is enough, though fragile: the world is made for the size of its denizens. That is a great comfort. It also provides a glimpse, mercifully erased from all but the reader’s memory, of the numinous in contact with life. Our friends bumble along with mother wit and good cheer and an unwavering sense of decency. The obstacles they meet are all their size, though it is clearly a world fraught with things much larger, things that give meaning, consequence to life and death.
Unknowing 
I was in the thrift store and a boy who’d been dragged there by his mother was poking about glumly among the books…and I’d seen ‘The Wind in the Willows’ a moment before so I snatched it and handed it to him. I hope he took it home.
You said, “The Wind in the Willows provides is a vision of life in which only the most common sort of heroism is enough, though fragile: the world is made for the size of its denizens.”
And I think that is beautifully put. It is comforting indeed.
Thanks. It is a book about which many good things can be said.