Lewis Carrol's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

There's something really wonderful about reading a small, old book. I feel like I'm being transported in to the past - like I'm the little girl who read Alice in Wonderland in 1865. My copy, from the Mac library, even has a beautiful scrawling handwritten notation: "To Ricky on his fifth Birthday from Grandma L. April 15, 1945." It's so wonderful I almost can't stand it!

The poem introducing the book makes me want to go exploring on some epic journey or something:

Alice! a childish story take,

And with a gentle hand

Lay it where Childhood's dreams are twined

In Memory's mystic band,

Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers

Plucked in a far-off land.

This story makes you see the world in a new light, with new priorities. I think this is exactly what I need. Alice says, "what's the use of a book..without pictures or conversations?". For Alice, life is about interaction and imagination. She gets much more philosophical later on, but in an honest way. The thing I envy the most in Alice is her ability to think without an agenda. She lets one thought follow to the next without a care in the world where that path may lead her.

Alice's sense of identity is amazing. She believes that she can shut herself up like a telescope and shrink if she "only knew how to begin". I should do many impossible things if I focused so much on just getting started. As she shrinks for the first of many times, Alice worries...no...wonders what would happen if she disapeared completely: "She tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing." What a free mind she must have to assume that she will continue to exist when her body is gone. She lives so much in her ideas and imaginings that her physical form does not concern her.

The little girl's self examination is so candid as well. While stuck at the bottom of the rabbit hole Alice thinks of her family coming to get her. She responds saying, "I shall only look up at them and say, 'Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else' ". Alice's identity is examined again by the caterpillar's famous "Who are yoooou?" inquries. She answers, "I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then....I can't explain myself...because I'm not myself, you see." What a wonderfully confusing place to be. Alice, and I, and most people, like to stay the same. If there's one thing that I've learned from this book, it's that I need to examine, and test, who I am until I find who it is that I want to be.