I am so glad that Lewis Carroll wrote back when he did because, I have to say that he would sure get canceled now, and I love these books so much! If you’ve only seen one of the movies, shame on you!

Read the book.

I wrote a one-woman play¹ once in which the main character spoke entirely in quotes from these books. The play is not about Alice, she doesn’t go to Wonderland, she is living among us and the world makes as little sense to her as Wonderland does to Alice. Every now and then she thinks she gets it, and she does what she thinks is going to make sense in that situation. But, no. No, she’s wrong. What she thinks is what they’re thinking isn’t what they’re thinking – and then, no matter what she does, it’s wrong.

These books are full of such silly nonsense – completely unredeeming without a single sensible lesson for impressionable young children. Like Into the Night², only G-rated, of course.

And such language! Listen to this:

Hardly knowing what she did, she picked up a little bit of stick, and held it out to the puppy: whereupon the puppy jumped into the air off all its feet at once, with a yelp of delight, and rushed at the stick, and made believe to worry it; then Alice dodged behind a great thistle, to keep herself from being run over; and, at the moment she appeared on the other side, the puppy made another rush at the stick, and tumbled head over heels in its hurry to get hold of it: then Alice, thinking it was very like having a game of play with a cart-horse, and expecting every moment to be trampled under its feet, ran round the thistle again: then the puppy began a series of short charges at the stick running a little way forward each time and a long way back, and barking hoarsely all the while, till at last it sat down a good way off, panting, with its tongue hanging out of its mouth, and its great eyes half shut.

Talk about run-on sentences! And not unusual, there’s a another like this about flamingos. I love it! Although I would never do something so grammatically improper, no sirree.

The only thing is, there’s this one passage that I just can’t figure out. I was working for a guy who had a grad degree in English from, I think it was, MIT, so I figured he’d know. So I brought the book in and showed him the passage and asked him to diagram for it. He looked at it, laughed, and brought the topic back to that, you know, work thing.

So I’m going to spring it on you here. If you specialize in the graphing of sentences in English, I request that you please do this one because I think that will help me figure out what the heck is going on in this sentence. I tried it myself but I couldn’t get it. Perhaps it is a typo in this edition – although, I think I remember going to bookstore, pulling a different edition off the shelf and checked if it was the same. (It was.)

Here it goes:

Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

No, that wasn’t it. Oh dear, every page is dog eared so I can’t find it now.

Alas. But worth reading anyway.

1. Well, one woman and a lot of people running around in the background. ↩︎
2. Best movie ever but clearly there is a conspiracy to keep it off the digital channels. Perhaps one of the actors – or John Landis who directed and plays a cameo – considers it a child of shame. If you can get your hands on it, do. ↩︎