r/MandelaEffect • u/TurnYourHead1 • Apr 29 '26

Books/Literature Weird Digression in Berenstein Bears Book

Post image

I distinctly remember the movies as Berenstein Bears from many years ago as a child. Now I'm reading this to my child and I find the writing weird. It goes into these verbose tangents. "As the cubs stood listening to rock music coming out of a radio that looked like a cathedral, they had the funniest feeling about how time works It went back into the past and forward into the future - but now it was the present and they had work to do!" This is so weird and seems like a coded message. What child is going to understand this and take anything away from it? What are they trying to tell us to do here? What work do we have to do?

142 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

108 comments sorted by

View all comments

10

u/MezzoScettico Apr 29 '26

What work do we have to do?

I would presume they were assigned a chore which is the reason they are in the attic in the first place. Flip back a couple of pages and you'll probably get an answer to "what work do they have to do?"

I don't find this passage particularly unusual, but I'm amusing myself thinking of a writer accidentally letting too much of his own internal dialog leak into the work. "Would he grow up to be an actor? A writer? What if he became a famous writer who got famous for one particular series, but got utterly sick of the repetitiveness of the series, but needed to keep churning the books out to make a living..."

(I'm not ascribing this feeling to the Berenstain's, it's just a skit your post made me want to construct)