December 20, 1903 [Alice in Wonderland]

 

I believe I place too much importance on Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Everything I read of any value seems somehow to remind me of Alice; if allusions must knock around in my head, Shakespeare or the Bible would make more sense—then again, that may be the point exactly: Alice's dreams fit the world better, its nonsense growing like Alice herself, eat-me-drink-me stretchings and shrinkings the best indications of the way things are: According to a Virginia paper, two brothers in North Carolina have turned a box kite into a flying machine. As brief as the flights may have been, and as little as we seem to care—most people seem to shrug off the story as nothing but the usual newspaper flim-flam—they have changed everything—and so too there's Alice, the wind picking up pepper, the baby becoming a pig, the dreamer dreaming inside her own dream. And the Wrights have traced Carroll's strange equations on the sky with a finger made of timber wrapped in canvas, an improbable logical grin hanging in mid-air.

The Alice in Wonderland we saw was, of course, a disappointment. Like the flying machine down South, the books work best in the mind—on the screen it was simply a series of matter-of-fact representations of a rabbit with a pocket-watch, playing-card guards, and sundry school pageant figures milling about. There was one moment—Alice trapped in the White Rabbit's house—that seemed to match the Tenniel drawing from the book—but then the work-a-day images filed along, and the moment was lost—one glimpse of a web of image, imagination, memory, and fleeting solidity real, then gone, like the flying machine must have seemed to those on the far side of the sandy plain.