Recently I had cause to revisit Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Immediately I asked myself, why on earth don’t I revisit Lewis Carrol more often? What fun. So pertinent!
Here’s an excerpt from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party that just about sums up today’s shenanigans, be they double-speak from politicians, not-so-subtle messages from the Sussexes, or weasel words in planning applications:
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
Another exchange that amuses me is an encounter between Alice and the Duchess (an antagonist of the Queen of Hearts), that must have inspired Sir Humphrey:
“Oh, I know!” exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last remark, “it’s a vegetable. It doesn’t look like one, but it is.”
“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is–‘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.'”
Being a big fan of logic, I really enjoy Tweedledee’s comment in Through the Looking Glass:
“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
Fitting then, that Helen Keller (1880 – 1968) said of democracy in the US, “We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee."
But the last word has to go to my alter-ego – the Cheshire Cat:
“I’m not crazy. My reality is just different than yours.”
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