Recently, I’ve had to pick up and read Lewis Carrol’s original Alice in Wonderland for a literature class, and while there was an infinite number of possibilities for how this experience could have gone for me, I couldn’t have expected it to confuse me to the point that it does. First Alice was laying on the ground next to her sister, and then there was a rabbit, and then a rabbit hole, she fell, there was a mouse… Am I the mad one here? Why is it so fast?
I suppose that the illogical and fast nature is the point… After all, Alice in Wonderland was made up by Carrol, who is really Charles Dodgson, to appeal to Alice Liddel and her siblings during a boating trip one day. I thank my annotated edition for teaching me that, alongside plenty of other things, like that there is no known origin for the phrase “grinning like a Cheshire cat.” Did you know that? I sure didn’t…
But why am I going on about how the story confuses me? I think that it reminded me of a lesson I had ought to have kept in my heart this whole time. Stop trying to get the whole picture all at once, especially the first time. I was rereading every word trying to wrap my head around the construction of the hallway, and why there was a caucus race of little animals and why they were talking about politics to try and dry themselves off when they were wet by swimming through Alice’s tears. Writing all this back, it’s making me laugh in my own thinking that there could have been sense made out of all of this. I gave up by the part when Alice ran out of the hallway into the white rabbit’s house and then ran out of there just to end up in a dense forest. Nope, just take me wherever you want to go story…
So all in all, I’m going to not try and wrap my head around a story like this. It takes more thinking and more discussing and more thinking back and more going “Oh my god, the way you phrase it does make a lot of sense now that I think about it.” I’m going to get lost in wonderland, and I’ll be back again very soon…
