Determining the Nature of the Beast

This morning, gleeful about school's cancellation by the latest of many snow storms, Ian came down to the kitchen, where I was making coffee, sat down, and sang a bar of "Be Our Guest," from Disney's "Beauty and the Beast". He then embarked on a perfectly serious conversation with me as to what kind of beast Beast actually was. My best guess was either bull or ox. Ian got very excited at this thought, because he, too, was thinking perhaps he was an ox. But then I started treading into uncharted, and potentially off-limits territory, by speculating that Beast was perhaps not really a beast after all, but rather a hybrid of beast and human.

Ian gave the thesis and antithesis a bit of attention, and then weighed in with his considered synthesis - definitely leaning more toward the traditional understanding of the paradigm.

"Daddy, I don't really think he's a mix of human and animal. I mean, he could talk, but the rest was more like an animal that wears clothes."

(January 27, 2011)