I first wrote about the Alice books here in early 2010.
While it was clear that they and discussion around them were things I loved, I’d not
yet begun this series of posts — although Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice work got referenced in the debut installment later that year. So inducting them officially into my roster of 55 Favorites (and counting) didn’t feel necessary until a few recent events persuaded me.
The above pic came to light as I was going through some cloud photos. I had wanted
to provide a look at my Alice items on the shelf, unpacked from the boxes they’d been in; however, I’d rearranged and decided the best place for them was on a vintage dresser topped with a mirror — if you get it, you get it — and pieces set to hold small lamps but also good for teacups. Since the items have been sitting piled on that dresser with other stuff mixed in for too long now, I’m sharing the older incarnation despite having added to my modest collection and sadly not being able to revert the photo to the wider shot I must have taken back then.
I’ve been holding onto an unusually intense dream that’s appropriate for today.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, was leading a very small tactical team including me on a covert mission deep within the Kremlin. We all were incredibly silent and the living quarters were eerily vacant as we breached them, so I figured there had to be help from the inside — which just got me even more worried that our mission was to, you know, take a certain someone out, quite possibly for the greater good of humanity but perhaps at a cost to my own since I was new to this stuff.
Once we arrived in a long, ostentatious dining room, a signal was given and a bunch
of children filed in. Then a film projector started up and unspooled Star Wars on an expanse of blank wall space to the kids’ delight. I can’t say if it was meant to be humanitarian relief for a group of hostages, soft propaganda to win over sheltered, indoctrinated young minds, or what, but it was apparently successful as the scene jumped to a few of us sitting in a dimly lit parlor with a woman who might have been the late Madeleine Albright offering congratulations on a job well done.
