The Dilated Pupils of Lewis Carroll

Yes, I am reading the Karen Armstrong book about fundamentalist religion, but I am tempering this activity… tempering it, I say, with the reading of something I have wanted to read for a long long time.
← Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Followed by Through The Looking-Glass.
Sitting here at Starbucks I have just finished the former one.
Wow! It is delightfully NUTTY!
At one point Alice meets a hookah-smoking caterpillar!
But I think maybe Lewis Carroll was the one smoking a hookah!
It’s a great book. I can’t wait to read the other one now.
Remember when I asked you to remind me about Alice? [Actually I do not expect any of you to remember but seriously I did say one time about 400 years ago that you all needed to remind me to read this crazy book].

There are just so many bizarre characters in Wonderland. I like where Alice uses a flamingo as a croquet mallet.
And the conversations, the dialogue, I love it.
At the crazy Tea-Party, the March Hare says to Alice, “Take some more tea.”
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”

Everywhere in Wonderland there is this emphasis on the precision of saying things correctly… and yet, the things said are nuttier than a bag of hammers!
For instance, at one point, the ever-moralizing Duchess tells Alice that it is important to → “Be what you would seem to be” – or if you’d like it put more simply – “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.”
Yep.
I am now convinced that Lewis Carroll’s pipe was definitely filled with something other than tobacco!

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