Oh, Alice!

Have I told you lately how hard it is for me to maintain a blog? In the midst of multiple interviews up and down the East Coast, freezing temperatures, and wondering how it is that my best friends are doing all over the world, apprehension is the easiest and most sincere feeling. Something about winter is terribly gloomy, and unlike some of my snowbunny buddies who worship those glittering flakes (you freaks know who you are), I’m really happy that Connecticut has yet to be entrenched in feet of snow. Snow is beautiful, but snow is brutal. I prefer looking at it from the window with a book, snuggled inside a wool blankie!

I’ve finished Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and the differences between my recent impressions of these stories and those of my blessed childhood are glaringly different. This is a freaky, freaky book, and Lewis Carroll is tricky, tricky writer. It dawned on me that Alice’s experience of this seemingly backward universe, rendering her as “ignorant,” demonstrates two parallel truths: Alice’s truth of childhood and the absurdity of adulthood from a child’s perspective, and adult conventions rendering the truth of childhood both absurd and irrelevant. I really should have read this earlier and banked a great essay for Sociology & Anthropology or Postmodernism…

As you grow older, some people lose that lens, that absurdity and creativity. I’m glad to be in a field where a certain level of “absurdity” is almost required. Yes, it is absolutely necessary for you to go through six chains of command in the office only to end up where you’ve started on a project…off with your head (we’ve all been there)! In comparison, for those of you that have read this book, why is it that when you walk away from a little house for hours you don’t end up remotely where you started? Oh, Alice.

Any of you having this sort of experience with childhood book as an “adult?”