Which way to Wonderland

“As this is May”, I’m reading about Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Stumbled over them a week ago, as I took shelter from the rain in a bookstore. The thought of re-reading the tale has been sporadically flickering in my mind for some years now – at first I was amused by the idea, then I gradually became aware of some fuzzy feeling of ‘unfinished business’ accompanying it.

I believe this has been the first book I’ve ever read – or at least the first one I can remember of. It was summer, I was 7 or 8, and borrowed it from the library of the school where my grandfather taught. I see myself reading in the school’s courtyard, sitting on the ground by the apple tree from which my swing hung.

The book may have been some sort of short version, since when I took it back to the library, the lady there praised me for reading it so quickly (I’m sure I haven’t skipped anything in there). And gave me a second one – probably “Through the Looking Glass” (I don’t actually remember which was the first and which, the second).

[What path do children take, flanked by stupid praises and interdictions?... Where does it lead? “No, you’ll fall!” – to a child jumping over some small yellow cylinder on the sidewalk, “No, you’ll get wet!” – to a smiling curious girl who wanted to test with one foot the water in the mockup river from the previous post, etc. And I can’t describe you the change on the kids’ faces as they turned ‘good’ and took the grownups’ hands... Undoubtedly, these kids would also be praised for getting good marks in school. The better the marks, the 'better' the kid: children become proficient in the dead geography of a mockup world built by previous generations.]

Only this time, reading even faster became my goal. After galloping along the sentences, I run back with the book. But the expected sugar cube turned into a sour blow: the librarian didn’t believe I had read the whole book. Even today I have the ‘phenomenological’ memory of the feeling I then had.

So I assumed ‘properly’ reading about Alice, after all these years, would somehow tie up the annoyingly indefinite loose ends. Started reading the book… smiled a few times, ‘recognized’ things in there, intellectually tasted the symbolism, but… no ‘revelation’!...

Today (it all goes veeeery slowly, ha ha) I diligently took the book again in my hands. The same... But then a funny (and sort of liberating) idea suddenly lit up my mind: what if the heavy mismatch feeling I had in the library had less to do with what happened then, and was more of a signpost of the path I was about to take?...