I daresay I'm like most of my
contemporaries in knowing about Lewis Carroll's Alice books –
without having read them. As a child, I owned a 45 rpm record
containing the songs from the 1951 Disney movie, Alice in
Wonderland and I saw the movie
as well. But, having just read Anthony Lane's article in the June 8
and 15, 2015 New Yorker,
I see now how much I didn't know about these tales.
Of course, we are
talking about a journey here – and Lane's choice of quotations, if
not his text, make it clear that this is a spiritual journey. Here's
the first:
“'You know very
well you're not real.'
'I am
real!' said Alice, and began to
cry.
'You won't make
yourself a bit realler by crying,' Tweedledee remarked: 'there's
nothing to cry about.'
'If I wasn't
real,' Alice said – half laughing through her tears, it all seemed
so ridiculous – 'I shouldn't be able to cry.'
'I
hope you don't suppose those are real
tears?' Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.”
Was Carroll
enlightened? Or just amusing himself? Or maybe a combination of both?
Here's another:
“I
hardly know which is me and which is the inkstand. . . . The
confusion in one's mind
doesn't so much matter – but when it comes to putting
bread-and-butter, and the orange marmalade, into the inkstand;
and then dipping pens into oneself,
and filling oneself up
with ink, you know, it's horrid!”
Rumi, who
definitely wasn't kidding, expressed it thus:
There
are no words to explain
no
tongue,
how
when that player touches
the
strings, it is me playing
and
being played,
how
existence turns
around
this music, how stories
grow
from the trunk,
how
cup and mouth
swallow
each other with the wine. . . .
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