Starvard.Starvard.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Alice follows a nervous rabbit down a hole and lands in a world where animals talk, tea parties never end, and the Queen of Hearts wants to chop off everyone's head. Nothing down there follows the rules, and that is the point. It is a dream you can read.
Alice, bored beside a river, follows a waistcoated rabbit down a hole and falls in and out of sizes, sense, and trouble. She takes tea with a Hatter who asks unanswerable riddles, plays croquet with flamingos for mallets, and stands trial before the King and Queen of Hearts, who want to cut off somebody's head. She finally tells the whole court they are nothing but a pack of cards.
Carroll, a mathematics don, is playing with logic itself. The book is full of rules that eat their own tails: arguments that are perfectly formed and perfectly empty, growing and shrinking that change nothing about who Alice is. Underneath the jokes sits a serious question about identity: if your size, name, and memories change, what is left that is you?
Adults return because the nonsense keeps turning out to be sense in disguise; children, because it takes their side against bossy grown ups. Watch the caucus race and the trial, parodies of politics and law that never date. The dream ends exactly when Alice stops being polite to it.
Alice follows a white rabbit down a rabbit hole into a world of mad tea parties, vanishing cats, and impossible riddles. Lewis Carroll's dream of a book has been delighting children and grown-ups for more than 150 years.
The first chapter
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied;
While little hands make vain pretence
Our wanderings to guide.
Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,
Beneath such dreamy weather,
To beg a tale of breath too weak
To stir the tiniest feather!
Yet what can one poor voice avail
Against three tongues together?
Imperious Prima flashes forth
Her edict “to begin it”:
In gentler tones Secunda hopes
“There will be nonsense in it.”
While Tertia interrupts the tale
Not more than once a minute.
Anon, to sudden silence won,
In fancy they pursue
The dream-child moving through a land
Of wonders wild and new,
In friendly chat with bird or beast—
And half believe it true.
And ever, as the story drained
The wells of fancy dry,
And faintly strove that weary one
To put the subject by,
“The rest next time—” “It is next time!”
The happy voices cry.
Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:
Thus slowly, one by one,
Its quaint events were hammered out—
And now the tale is done,
And home we steer, a merry crew,
Beneath the setting sun.
Alice! A childish story take,
And with a gentle hand
Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined
In Memory’s mystic band,
Like pilgrim’s withered wreath of flowers
Pluck’d in a far-off land.
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied;
While little hands make vain pretence
Our wanderings to guide.
Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,
Beneath such dreamy weather,
To beg a tale of breath too weak
To stir the tiniest feather!
Yet what can one poor voice avail
Against three tongues together?
Imperious Prima flashes forth
Her edict “to begin it”:
In gentler tones Secunda hopes
“There will be nonsense in it.”
While Tertia interrupts the tale
Not more than once a minute.
Anon, to sudden silence won,
In fancy they pursue
The dream-child moving through a land
Of wonders wild and new,
In friendly chat with bird or beast—
And half believe it true.
And ever, as the story drained
The wells of fancy dry,
And faintly strove that weary one
To put the subject by,
“The rest next time—” “It is next time!”
The happy voices cry.
Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:
Thus slowly, one by one,
Its quaint events were hammered out—
And now the tale is done,
And home we steer, a merry crew,
Beneath the setting sun.
Alice! A childish story take,
And with a gentle hand
Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined
In Memory’s mystic band,
Like pilgrim’s withered wreath of flowers
Pluck’d in a far-off land.
Source: Standard Ebooks. Published 1865. Author died 1898. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp