Buddhistdoor International
2015-07-10
Last Saturday, 4 July, was the 239th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence. But it was also the 150th anniversary of something far more whimsical: Lewis Carroll’s literary nonsense classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll’s story is of a little girl who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantastic realm populated by magical creatures and nonsensical characters. It ends with Alice waking up from what turns out to be a dream, leaving the reader to dwell on motifs of childhood, innocence, and growing up, the apparent meaningless of life, and the shadow of violence (many of us remember the Queen of Hearts’s commanding “Off with their heads!”).
As a story set in a dream, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is also one of several fictional worlds that explore ideas and themes about illusion and its opposite, insight. Exploring such “illusory fiction” can be a thought-provoking means to investigate how literature and popular culture grapple with the sense that reality is not what it seems. Similar to what many great religions tell us, stories concerning illusory fiction posit that the only way for the protagonist to earn redemption is to break out of their false reality.
http://newlotus.buddhistdoor.com/en/news/d/47251
Mike