Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
This is one of my favorite books of all time. I love the illustrations, the story, the characters, and everything else about it. It's a dreamy book built on the fairy tales of Victorian England, and creates a world that echos into modern story telling. At it's base Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a story about a young girl trying to make sense of an adult reality. Alice falls asleep and is thrust into Wonderland, a place that is like her awake world but is also absurd. She is a child trying to process adult concepts and adult conversations has no language or ability to put them in context. What Alice does is she uses her language, fairy tales, and attempts to process what she sees. What we get is a world that is familiar and also contains talking fish, rabbits, and a dysfunctional deck of cards. Alice's projections also force her to admit that she doesn't know who she is. She experiments by growing taller, smaller, her tears create problems, her reactions to things allow her to take control of situations. At the end of the story she's saddened that she's forced to go back to her reality, but she's wiser than when she started.
Alice's adventures are now part of modern story telling. Disney movies are full of talking animals that symbolize adult situations, and teach children how to deal with them. The pack of dogs from the Pixar movie Up come to mind. As funny as they were, they symbolized that dealing with a hostile group of people isn't easy. It teaches kids that going against the grain and standing up for themselves is not only okay, but a requirement in adult life.
Walking away from this book, perhaps for the final time in my adult life, I'm reminded that a fantasy world can teach us a lot about our reality. Alice's adventures are comparable to what's happening tonight if we look hard enough. Projecting her story on a modern backdrop does us all a world of good. We learn more about our past, and we are able to put our present into context. Carroll's story stays with us because of how true it is.
Next up, I'm reading Little Women. I'm going to try to encourage more men to read that book. And yes, I realize that may be a major challenge, but you'll just have to deal with it.
This is one of my favorite books of all time. I love the illustrations, the story, the characters, and everything else about it. It's a dreamy book built on the fairy tales of Victorian England, and creates a world that echos into modern story telling. At it's base Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a story about a young girl trying to make sense of an adult reality. Alice falls asleep and is thrust into Wonderland, a place that is like her awake world but is also absurd. She is a child trying to process adult concepts and adult conversations has no language or ability to put them in context. What Alice does is she uses her language, fairy tales, and attempts to process what she sees. What we get is a world that is familiar and also contains talking fish, rabbits, and a dysfunctional deck of cards. Alice's projections also force her to admit that she doesn't know who she is. She experiments by growing taller, smaller, her tears create problems, her reactions to things allow her to take control of situations. At the end of the story she's saddened that she's forced to go back to her reality, but she's wiser than when she started.
Alice's adventures are now part of modern story telling. Disney movies are full of talking animals that symbolize adult situations, and teach children how to deal with them. The pack of dogs from the Pixar movie Up come to mind. As funny as they were, they symbolized that dealing with a hostile group of people isn't easy. It teaches kids that going against the grain and standing up for themselves is not only okay, but a requirement in adult life.
Walking away from this book, perhaps for the final time in my adult life, I'm reminded that a fantasy world can teach us a lot about our reality. Alice's adventures are comparable to what's happening tonight if we look hard enough. Projecting her story on a modern backdrop does us all a world of good. We learn more about our past, and we are able to put our present into context. Carroll's story stays with us because of how true it is.
Next up, I'm reading Little Women. I'm going to try to encourage more men to read that book. And yes, I realize that may be a major challenge, but you'll just have to deal with it.
(Image brought to you by: stpaulgirlstakephotos)
No comments:
Post a Comment