These issues in turn raise a critical question of whether the picture book comprises a self-enclosed world like other literature or whether it must depend in some cases on adult interpretation. Gallaz and Innocenti's Rose Blanche is also mystifying without background commentary and connections. What we do know is that social context affects and even effects text. Yet Schindler's List is shown on TV, with children wandering in and out of living rooms all over the country. Through the pervasive presence of multimedia, the worlds of adulthood and childhood that underwent separation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are once again fusing.
Children see all but know little.
And we are left to explain what we can, through books such as Waldman's The Never-Ending Greenness , and to do what we can, which is sometimes nothing more or less than planting a tree.