…and Through the
Looking Glass (which I do not think I’ve read before.)
The first and last time I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland I was ten years old. I struggled
to finish it then, probably because I really didn’t “get it.” (And I was at
least as distractible then as I am now.) I had hoped for fantastical whimsy (I
was already well in love with Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory), but only seemed to be getting confused. I have
vague memories of Alice changing sizes every few minutes, lots of impatient,
grumpy and screaming characters, and odd creatures like the Cheshire Cat, Mock
Turtle, and the hookah-smoking caterpillar, whose very existences seemed to be
some kind of joke in on which I was not. In short, I was more confused than
Alice.
This time around, I hoped to find the charm and whimsy I had
missed many (many) years ago. Sadly, I did not. The story mostly seemed like a
particularly odd dream (which it is), shifting pictures and little progress
with no real plot or moral. It reminded me of some of the goofy stories and
nonsense sentences I would make up on the fly for my younger cousins and my
nieces when they were in a particularly giggly mood.
Happily, I find foolishness and silly nonsense perfectly
acceptable forms of entertainment. (I’m an unapologetic fan of The Three
Stooges.) While I do like to have a little more warmth, cheer and free-spiritedness
with my stark raving madness, I enjoy he fun and engaging language (“Curiouser
and curiouser!”) and love some of the scenes, characters, and quotable lines (“Why,
sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”)
Those little adventures, weird folks, and odd quotes really can be enjoyed
individually on their own merits, since there is little connecting them
together throughout the story. And that’s mostly the value I found in this
re-reading.
Alice’s adventures do keep moving along, however, tea party
to croquet match, chess-board pawn to chess-board queen. I kept the pages
turning if for no other reason than to see what silly nonsense was going to
happen next. I was even more aware that I was often missing out on some joke
that would probably be hilarious to me if I was a contemporary of the author,
and I found some of the disconnectedness and grumpiness frustrating, but the
classic scenes and characters, the ones everybody seems to know, are really so
much fun that I enjoyed visiting them in their homes down the rabbit hole and through
the looking glass.
What would life be like if we didn’t know the Mad Hatter,
the White Rabbit, or the grinning Cheshire Cat? Don’t we all have days when we’re
called upon to believe impossible things, before breakfast and beyond? Or felt
like “here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same
place”? And isn’t being able to quote at least a few lines form “Jabberwocky”
one of the most fun things in the world? Callooh! Callay!
A Year of Books I’ve Read Before
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