Yum, Finishing Off The Cake
A gray rainy spring day… I do not remember turning off the alarm on the bedside radio, but who else could have managed? Thus, I rose one hour later than is my custom. How much of my life amounts to actions of which I have no memory? I am surprised by effects which seem like random happenings, but upon examination are a certain result of what I have done. Down, down the rabbit hole… That is what happens when one chases after a white rabbit.
I am contemplating writing a book. WTF, — I’ve never written more than a collection of essays and that was long ago when a student. Lately it has been my habit writing a few paragraphs day to day in this blog. A book is something else again, something with a narrative flow, or a work with a definite point. Is there a point that I have in mind to make? Do I have the tensile strength to make a journey, learning about structure, grammar, deft expression all the way to a conclusion, which must be a resting place. There is no terminus. No paradisical destination, an end-of-the-line with every conundrum, those tragic lose ends “wiped away.” There’s only rest – and the story continues.
I will never know unless I start, go ahead with the experience. Step over the edge, follow the white rabbit into the hole. Surely there are things I’ll encounter, when consumed, will make me bigger, and some smaller. Sometimes I’ll be the same.
Either way, writer and reader will arrive together where we supposed to go.
Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words ‘EAT ME’ were beautifully marked in currants. ‘Well, I’ll eat it,’ said Alice, ‘and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!’
She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, ‘Which way? Which way?’, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out–of–the–way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.
-excerpt Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, chapt. 1 by Lewis Carroll
