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Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland with John Shelton · Christians Reading Classics

0:04
SPEAKER_02: 160 years ago, in the year 1865, an Oxford Don in mathematics published a book on something far outside his field of expertise.
0:15
SPEAKER_02: His name is Charles Ludwig Dotson.
0:18
SPEAKER_02: But you know, you've more likely heard of him under his pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
0:25
SPEAKER_02: The book we're talking about is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
0:29
SPEAKER_02: Its instant success inspired the author to write a sequel, published in 1871, through the looking glass and what Alice found there.
0:39
SPEAKER_02: Both books were inspired by the author's friendship with Alice Liddell, the young daughter of Henry George Liddell, an Oxford dean and a renowned classicist.
0:51
SPEAKER_02: As an aside, if you have ever studied classical Greek, you have come across Henry Liddell's most important academic work, a Greek-English lexicon, or colloquially known as Liddell and Scott, after its editors.
1:06
SPEAKER_02: But we're not here to talk about Greek vocabulary today.
1:09
SPEAKER_02: Rather, we're here to talk about Alice and her adventures.
1:14
SPEAKER_02: Carol opened his tail as follows.
1:18
SPEAKER_02: Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do.
1:24
SPEAKER_02: Once or twice, she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it.
1:32
SPEAKER_02: And what is the use of a book?
1:34
SPEAKER_02: thought Alice, without pictures or conversation.
1:38
SPEAKER_02: So she was considering in her own mind, as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid, whether the pleasure of making a daisy chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
1:58
SPEAKER_02: There was nothing so very remarkable in that, nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the rabbit say to itself, Oh dear, oh dear, I shall be late.
2:08
SPEAKER_02: When she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural.
2:16
SPEAKER_02: But when the rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat pocket and looked at it and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet.
2:27
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Near Orthodoxy.
2:32
SPEAKER_02: I'm Nadia Williams, and today it is a delight to speak about Alice's adventures in Wonderland with John Shelton.
2:39
SPEAKER_02: He is the policy director for Advancing American Freedom.
2:42
SPEAKER_02: He received his MDiv from Duke University, and before that, his BA from the University of Virginia, which happens to be my undergraduate alma mater as well.
2:52
SPEAKER_02: John lives in Washington, D.C.
2:54
SPEAKER_02: with his wife Caitlin and their children.
2:56
SPEAKER_02: So thank you for joining me today.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me on, Nadia.
3:00
SPEAKER_02: So this season of the podcast focuses on literary classics with a significant anniversary.
3:06
SPEAKER_02: And I want to open with a somewhat more abstract question before we get to Alice's adventures in Wonderland proper.
3:13
SPEAKER_02: So what is a classic?
3:15
SPEAKER_02: Like, is it enough that we're reading this book still, um, 160 years after publication?
3:21
SPEAKER_02: Or what other criteria would you add, especially when we talk about children's books?
3:26
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a uh thorny question to unpack, but uh there's no doubt that we have before us a classic in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: The question is, is how how could we identify it as such?
3:40
SPEAKER_00: Is is the um the Disney animated movie that combines the original and the sequel?
3:45
SPEAKER_00: Is that enough to make it a classic?
3:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, just it would make you know um uh many other stories that have been adapted uh classics.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: Is it is it the all the psychoanalytic literature on uh Alice and all the uh you know hippie 1960s psychedelic rock songs about Alice?
4:05
SPEAKER_00: Um or is it just the fact that we still read and talk about Alice, uh that she appears everywhere from you know blockbuster films like The Matrix to um you know Taylor Swift's songs?
4:19
SPEAKER_00: You know, I I think I think the answer is yes.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: All of these things are are sure signs that that we have a classic because we can't help but think with Alice.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: Um we can't help but think with Lewis Carroll.
4:30
SPEAKER_00: They're um unremovable from not just our vocabulary, but our patterns of thought.
4:37
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what truly makes uh this this book or or marks it rather as a classic.
4:43
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
4:44
SPEAKER_02: So it has really permeated our very culture, our language uh expressions.
4:49
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I can think of a number like the Cheshire cats, who say somebody smiles like a Cheshire cat.
4:54
SPEAKER_02: Um, so many of those.
4:56
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
4:56
SPEAKER_02: That's remarkable.
4:57
SPEAKER_02: And I'm thinking, like as you're talking, that's a high bar because there are a lot of books that I would consider classics that haven't achieved all of those milestones that you were ticking off as you were talking.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, I think it's it's pretty easy to say that Alice is a classic.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: And then the question is, well, what about these other things that lack some of those characteristics?
5:18
SPEAKER_00: So um, you know, an example would be uh one of C.S.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: Lewis's favorite books, which was The Fairy Queen.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: We have no Disney adaptation for the Fairy Queen.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: It was one of his favorite children's stories, it's hardly read anymore.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: So is it somehow less classic simply because it's less received?
5:37
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, are classics completely subjective?
5:39
SPEAKER_00: I I think Lewis would be appalled at the notion, but um, there there does seem to be this cultural recognition of of these things, uh something innate about them that that makes them speak to us and um us speak through them and their words and and um uh plots and and and symbols and all these things.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I mean I I'd like to say that the fairy queen is also a a classic worth reading, but um you know we can debate that.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: And but what can't be debated is is Alice's merit.
6:12
SPEAKER_02: Well, let's dive into Alice's story and talk about what makes it so uh spectacularly like popular.
6:20
SPEAKER_02: So without spoiling too much, and I guess that's probably unavoidable here, let's go through the story and um consider what makes it so appealing.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, so we've got so it's just funny, even now.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: Um there's there are many things that would have been very funny to an original audience, um, you know, some some uh century or more ago, but that are no longer funny to us, and that we just don't have the right instincts to to get the gag lines and all these things.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: But um, right from the beginning, Alice is funny.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: Uh Alice doesn't realize that this white rabbit that she's seen in that passage you were just reading is um is in fact something odd at all until he I think starts worrying about being late.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: It's not the waistcoat, if if I recall, correct me if I'm wrong here, but but it it's it's the fact that he's fretting over being late that that Alice truly finds odd.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: Not that he's speaking, not that he's dressed as a human being.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: And so there's things like this.
7:21
SPEAKER_00: And she follows the rabbit down the rabbit hole.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: You know, again, another phrase that we get from Alice and that we use even if we don't know Alice.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: Again, I think that's a mark of a classic is whether or not we are interested in the classics, they are interested in us.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: And um we we can't get away from them.
7:38
SPEAKER_00: And so you might never have read.
7:40
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I was asking a coworker whether he had read Alice and he couldn't recall.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: He's he's seen the pictures and things, and it's it's um it especially with children's books, it's hard to remember, but we we know that we know these things about them, regardless of whether we've ever read them.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: And so immediately we see Alice falling down this hole, uh, down the rabbit hole.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: And she's she's um much like us, she's very concerned with her um appearance and seeming proper and all these things.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: And so she begins to wonder about the latitude and longitude, though she's not quite sure what these words refer to.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: She's wondering if she's falling towards what she calls the antipathies, which is uh, you know, as the the narrator tells us, not the word that uh the right word at all.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: She means the antipodes, the opposite sides of the earth.
8:28
SPEAKER_00: And so immediately we get this kind of satire of her own seriousness, that uh even as as Alice might be falling to her death, she's worrying about having the right words to say.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: It's like my um uh pardon me, but my my um my wife's grandmother was always worried that when she died, that she was wearing matching uh clothing and underwear, so that uh if if she were found found dead by by some ambulance, that she would not be uh further embarrassing herself by not wearing uh matching and complimentary things.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: So Alice is worried as she's plumbing to her death whether she's uh using these these big kid words correctly.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: And that's something that I think children enjoy is this pretending at being adult.
9:12
SPEAKER_02: It reminded me of how um when my kids like learn our new concept, they really want to show off big words.
9:18
SPEAKER_02: And it's almost like, oh yes, you can tell what Alice learned in school this week.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and Alice too is I mean, um for for people who haven't read uh Alice in Wonderland, maybe they're familiar with something like Madeline Langle's um what am I um uh Winkle in Time?
9:37
SPEAKER_00: Wrinkle in Time.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh and and Langle, you know, has no uh problem with talking about Tesser X and quantum science and all these things in a children's book.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: And uh, if you're a child reading it, you don't have any sense that these things are inappropriate for children to be talking about.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: Um with Lewis Carroll and Alice, you get much the same where these ideas that really are, you know, very adult ideas in many different ways are um just presented to children as delightful things to think and ponder over.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: So um in that even a four-year-old child, so my my kids aren't preternaturally smart or anything at all, but we were just reading um uh a section of of Alice uh tonight, and we we um uh there's you know the Queen.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: If you've seen the movies, um the Queen of Hearts is constantly calling for for people's heads to be lopped off.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: And the um and she she tells the executioner at some point, you know, if if they delay any longer, then cut off everybody's heads.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: And my four-year-old starts to laugh, and he's just kind of shaking his head.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: And he says, Well, how would they cut off everybody's head if the executioner has to do it?
10:50
SPEAKER_00: Who would cut off his head?
10:51
SPEAKER_00: And so even a four-year-old, and I never even thought about this.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: And so a four-year-old can can kind of enter into the absurdity.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: And I I think um Alice has been misread sometimes as being about nothing at all, that it's it's pure whimsy.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's not right.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: I think it's uh a very serious book about whimsy, and that the idea that there's so much to delight in and and make fun of is pointing to these very serious and weighty realities.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: I think we're we're kind of ruined in in part by the hippie culture that has seen in Alice only kind of drug-fueled psychedelia, rather than this kind of very serious task of of whimsy.
11:34
SPEAKER_02: And the fact that you can tell a legitimate story, a journey through whimsy, which is what we have here.
11:41
SPEAKER_02: I mean, Alice has a sort of her own maybe odyssey of sorts.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, and I I think I think that's um, you know, not just my sort of let's make this a night, you know, um one of the characters in in Alice says there's a moral in everything if if you look for it, or something along those lines.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: And you know, there's things contradicting this later about well, if there's no point at all, that saves us a lot of work.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh I think a character later says, but um, even in the ending of the book, uh uh Lewis as he's as he's narrating, um oh no, in fact, maybe this is from a letter.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: Um you know, Lewis Carroll is uh is a deacon um in the Anglican church, and he so he he writes on various occasions like Easter and Christmas, and he he talks a lot about the the goodness, uh that that how children's delight is part of the created goodness, and that um that that people often think that you need to be serious all the time, and serious and somber and you know quiet, and um, and that to to smile at all is is to kind of betray this this sacred seriousness.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: And uh, I think Lewis has a sense like uh someone else like G.K.
12:54
SPEAKER_00: Chesterton did, that uh there's there is a a sacred seriousness, but there's also a sacred whimsy.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: And um yeah, Chesterton has some line in in I don't remember if it's orthodoxy or everlasting man about uh Christ's secret throughout the gospels that he that he he smiled and he he delighted.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: So that's something that I think is is clearly on display in Alice.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: It's not it's not all madness, it's it's madness to delight.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: Um it's not to just tear down logic, it's it's to kind of show logic in its its proper bounds.
13:29
SPEAKER_02: So I like that.
13:32
SPEAKER_02: And that actually reminds me even of like what we see a little a few decades later in Winnie the Pooh, just that delight.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: Um I I think you see uh these these ideas that probably are are first found in uh Lewis Carroll's Alice stories in a lot of later things.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: Like I was thinking through a lot of you know, we don't think of Looney Tunes as classics in the same way, perhaps, or nor Calvin and Hobbes as as classics in the same way.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: Though in my household we respect Calvin and Hobbes as a classic.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: Um but the idea of this this sort of um mischievous inverting uh this this uh you know, Calvin Ball, for example, a game where you make up the rules as you go, is you know, this the stuff of of Alice's adventures in Wonderland, Looney Tunes where the rules are constantly changing.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: Um and at one moment a painted road is just a painted road, but the next it's it's a pathway for uh Roadrunner to pass through.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: These are all things that I think we, you know, if not well, you know, Nadu, you you know very well that the Greeks and Romans had very similar versions of this kind of whimsy.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: Um but the we we certainly are handed it down and given it in in um you know distilled form by Lewis Carroll.
14:51
SPEAKER_02: Almost like modern mythology.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
14:55
SPEAKER_02: For kids, because kids get it.
14:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
14:59
SPEAKER_02: So the plot in this story, like the story, adventures, Alice's adventures in Wonderland, it is just thoroughly enticing and delightful.
15:07
SPEAKER_02: But another inseparable aspect of this book that has made it so just delightful and appealing is the writing, which just really sticks with you.
15:15
SPEAKER_02: And I remember how when I first asked you if you wanted to come on the podcast to talk to me about this book, you immediately rattled off quotations from memory.
15:24
SPEAKER_02: Um, most people like only can do this with books that really, really stick with them.
15:30
SPEAKER_02: So, what is it about Carol's writing specifically that makes it so memorable?
15:35
SPEAKER_00: I mean, first of all, he's just a good writer.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: So you have, it's not just people like me who've got pretty middle brow and often lowbrow tastes who enjoy um Lewis, Carol, and Alice.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: You even have people who are quite personicity about what they like, like J.R.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: Tolkien, who was not the biggest fan of Shakespeare, um, not even a big fan of, we already mentioned Edmund Spencer's The Fairy Queen, because he thinks they get fairy tale wrong and they just sort of don't have respect for the genre and all these things.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: J.R.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: Tolkien, you know, not a Shakespeare appreciator, huge Lewis Carroll appreciator.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: And he translates there's a poem in in the sequel through the looking glass, which I actually I think I like even more than the original.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: And and Tolkien did too.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's got a poem, The Jabberwocky, which is pure nonsense.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: We read it in school, I think, apart from the book.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: Um, Lewis translates it into, I believe, Old English.
16:27
SPEAKER_00: Or not Lewis, sorry, Tolkien does.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: Lewis um letters of him talking about, I can't remember if he translates it or just is admiring a translation of Jabberwocky into Latin.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, you've got these philologists who uh are just delighting in uh how absurd, because it it takes a good deal of work to be absurd.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, if you've ever tried to sound like a madman, you end up falling back into logic very, very quickly.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: It's it's hard to be irrational, um, if it's it's not your native language or way of thinking.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, it it takes someone as educated as J.R.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: Tolkien and C.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: S.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: Lewis to to truly appreciate what's going on in in Lewis Carroll.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, their fellow Oxford Don, uh who is uh so meticulously inverting logic that that there is extreme logic there.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: Um there's uh there's a uh I didn't grow up listening to well, I I I had my fair share of dad rock.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: And so there's the Jefferson Aeroplane song about um the White Rabbit, and there's some line in there about where um uh logic and proportion are are sloppy dead or something like that.
17:40
SPEAKER_00: And and I read somewhere, someone say that that's that's only half right.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: That um what's gone in in Alice's adventures is not logic whatsoever, it's proportion, and that's what makes it so absurd, is that there is logic because um even the passage I was talking with you about um before we this podcast, um Humpty Bump Humpty Dumpty is talking to Alice, which in itself is a funny and delightful thing, and they're constantly misunderstanding each other.
18:09
SPEAKER_00: It's it's like a um Marx Brothers skit or or something like that.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: Again, these are all after Alice and and uh you know undoubtedly um influenced by um inspired by Alice and Lewis Carroll.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: And um Humpty Dumpty is very logical.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: He just keeps switching between connotation and denotation when um you know he asks uh he asks uh Alice um and how old did you say you were?
18:37
SPEAKER_00: And Alice gives an answer to that question.
18:39
SPEAKER_00: It's a very straightforward seeming one to us, and uh uh she she gives the what we would take as the correct answer, and Humpty Dumpty says, You didn't say anything of the sort, uh, because the question was, uh, how old did you did you say you were?
18:53
SPEAKER_00: And and she had not said how old she was at all.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: And so uh what to us is kind of madness is just Humpty Dumpty is being overly rational and and losing, letting kind of the the denotation of his words override the the connotation that we all know.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: And so he's he's you know, Carol is showing us in all this the um I I think the the the balance that is required to understanding anything at all is is you know in part being not too serious and and having whimsy.
19:24
SPEAKER_00: Um in fact, any married couple can probably relate to this, uh, the the constant misunderstanding each other because one is being a little bit too logical, rational, and and not understanding the context uh of uh uh a statement.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: And and that's all over this book.
19:42
SPEAKER_02: And also just the overly literal, like the absurdity, like in this case, relies on being overly literal, which I think of as very childish.
19:50
SPEAKER_02: Like children are very literal.
19:52
SPEAKER_02: Um, before a certain age, like for instance, we've realized um you can't use irony with kids because they take the literal meaning.
20:00
SPEAKER_02: And it's like so funny.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: And and it's I you know it's an important thing to being uh a human being to figure out how all these things hold together.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, for example, I think about this all the time.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: Um, in passing, we say all sorts of things that we don't really mean explicitly in any sense whatsoever.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: Um, and and maybe we ought to to mean those things.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: But a good example of this is saying, as you see somebody, you know, how are you doing?
20:26
SPEAKER_00: Um very infrequently is someone truly trying to understand your heart of hearts and whether your day was rough or not.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: If they're a good person, they they hopefully are intending these things.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: But how are you actually just means like hello.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: And and to then give this person this tragic tale of, you know, whatever went wrong is will probably surprise them.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, because even though it's the perfectly logical and and I think humane thing to do, uh, because it's not the expected thing, even though that's what those words mean.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: How are you?
20:58
SPEAKER_02: It's the speech conventions, which again is part of the absurdity in this book that the speech conventions, like the expected rules of politeness, are flipped or just slightly, not fully flipped, and that's what makes it absurd.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's there's a great scene.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: Um uh I mean, there's all kinds of great things where metaphors become literal truths, like Alice begins to drown in her own tears.
21:24
SPEAKER_00: We say that sort of thing all the time, but Alice nearly achieves it.
21:27
SPEAKER_00: And in order to dry off, somebody has the idea of, well, we should tell a dry story.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: Let's what's the driest thing you know?
21:33
SPEAKER_00: And they start to talk about some archbishop in England, and you know, it's it makes sense when you think about the word dry, uh, but is completely absurd because you obviously can't try yourself with a dry story.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, the same thing happens too.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: Alice is, I think, talking to a mouse, and the mouse is talking about um his his tale, T A L E, and um, but then narrates his T A L E.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Tale in the form of a T A I L.
22:03
SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, the the And it's actually on the page, it's drawn as a tale, at least it's printed that way.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: This is something really interesting about Alice's stories.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: It's uh true for for both Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel through the looking glass.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: You can't you can't accomplish what Lewis Carroll accomplished in any other form than the written text.
22:27
SPEAKER_00: Um in through the looking glass, you've got words that are rever printed in reverse, um, not even just in backwards order, but but you would have to hold it up to a mirror to understand it.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: It's in cursive and things like that.
22:39
SPEAKER_00: And um, so you can't even do it with an audiobook.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: It's not, I mean, I I I would be the first to tell you that there's many things that are better to be listened to than to be read.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: In fact, we're were written with the intent of being read aloud.
22:53
SPEAKER_00: Um, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is not that you will miss so much um because you'll also miss all of the the illustrations.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: You'll get the conversations that that Alice is worried about in the beginning, but you won't get any of the illustrations.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: Um and and they're excellent too.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think they're why so many children love them.
23:12
SPEAKER_00: We were as we were just doing this upstairs for for bedtime, they they just kept wanting to see the pictures of the Mad Hatter and um Alice's neck growing to strange proportions and size and looking like a serpent and confusing the birds why Alice is up in the the the treetops and so on.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: And so um you can't it it does it doesn't work in the same way as an audiobook.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: And um, I think for good reason, most film adaptations of Alice ruin it in one way or another.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: And I again I'm a very lowbrow about these things.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: I think many film adaptations are excellent, but it's almost impossible to get Alice right in any form other than what it is.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: Um, you're either going to make it too uh psychedelic or or disturbing, like the Tim Burton um film adaptations, and you'll lose the whimsy because it it quickly um, and if you were just to read the plot of it and what exactly happens and go down the line of you know, this queen trying to kill all these people, it it will present much darker than it does to just read aloud um and to read with your eyes and see the pictures and all that.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: So it's it's a delicate act.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's um I think what's so admirable about it is that you could fall down on one side of the horse or the other at any moment, um, and and it could become this barbarous blood sport thing, or uh it and cease to be a children's story at all.
24:38
SPEAKER_02: I think about um, as you were talking about, I'm thinking about the significance that so many of these children's classics are designed with parents in mind, that you have a parent reading it to the child.
24:50
SPEAKER_02: And so then it's not as scary because it it is suddenly a bedtime story.
24:54
SPEAKER_02: And we know that bedtime stories cannot be like really awful scary things.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think I've got a couple different thoughts running in different directions, which is probably appropriate to any discussion of Lewis Carroll.
25:09
SPEAKER_00: Um I do think that we have a much lower tolerance for scary and surprising um than previous periods did.
25:19
SPEAKER_00: Um, and some of that's probably good.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: I remember watching, I can't remember if it was the original Fantasia or Fantasia 2000, but there's a scene in which, you know, the satanic demon is on top of this blazing mountain and all these spirits are swirling about.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: And this is a children's movie that's you know got very nice scenes and uh very colorful.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: And I remember being absolutely scared out of my wits by this, um, and decently scared too by the sorcerer's apprentice and at all these different things that are seen as more or less children's movies.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: The same thing with Aladdin, too, of Jafar uh turns into this very scary, large cosmic, you know, deity uh genie.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: And um, children's movies aren't made like that anymore.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: Children's books are largely not made like that anymore.
26:08
SPEAKER_00: Some of that might be wisdom.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, but I I kind of wonder if we're too averse to these things.
26:13
SPEAKER_00: I I I've seen and um read many, many people say, many um philosophers and and different people say that they don't think that Alice is a children's story at all because it's so violent, because there's, you know, beheading is on every other page, um, there's near drownings, um, the the madness sometimes turns to violence, like Alice being pelted with stones.
26:37
SPEAKER_00: Um in so is is this really appropriate to children?
26:41
SPEAKER_00: And I think for the most part, when you read children a book and you don't prime them, that it's scary if you if you read it in the right tone, they just delight in it and they don't find um, they don't have nightmares over this sort of thing.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, yeah.
26:57
SPEAKER_00: What do you I mean, what do you make of that, Nadia?
26:59
SPEAKER_00: I I I struggle and we our our kids, our oldest are four-year-old twins.
27:04
SPEAKER_00: And so it could be very well that our parenting strategies are traumatizing these kids by exposing them to you know, murderous uh um queens of heart and um uh you know disappearing Cheshire cats and um and all these things.
27:20
SPEAKER_02: But is the queen really murderous?
27:22
SPEAKER_02: I mean, she keeps yelling these things, but you can tell like it's not real.
27:26
SPEAKER_02: Like that's and that's what makes the difference.
27:29
SPEAKER_02: That like we're not actually talking, this is not a children's book about executions.
27:33
SPEAKER_02: Like it's not really.
27:35
SPEAKER_02: And you realize like these are all just a bunch of cards.
27:38
SPEAKER_02: Um, so um, precisely because the book is so good about cueing the children, that this is just meant to be like funny, absurd stuff, and no one really gets hurt.
27:49
SPEAKER_02: Like Alice is pelted with rocks, which turn out to be like cookies, so like cakes.
27:55
SPEAKER_02: So it's like it's not really.
27:57
SPEAKER_02: Um it's yet again that absurdity, just like when children play, like um for my boys, um, any little stick or even handouts from Sunday school at church immediately turned into weapons the second they left the room.
28:16
SPEAKER_02: Um, did they really like think they were killing someone with them?
28:20
SPEAKER_02: No.
28:20
SPEAKER_02: It's just how children play.
28:22
SPEAKER_02: So it's again kind of very similar in my mind, at least to like how violence is depicted here, where you really know it's no one's actually getting hurt here.
28:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, if you watch, um, I think Matthew Crawford made this this point in The World Beyond Your Head.
28:40
SPEAKER_00: If you watch old um, you know, um, well, Bugs Bunny would be a good example, but I think he uses um uh Mickey Mouse.
28:50
SPEAKER_00: And you watch old Mickey Mouse cartoons, there's a lot of slapstick style humor and random acts of chaos and and violence happen, and they sort of just move on, and sometimes it's funny and sometimes it just happens.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, and he says in The World Beyond Your Head, um, if you watch Mickey Mouse's Funhouse, which we've watched many times, or Clubhouse, or whatever it is, um the there's there's always a discrete problem, and it's always solved by the end, and that it's always solved by using the tools that are available at hand.
29:21
SPEAKER_00: And and Crawford's worried that we are teaching children um that the world is is overly masterable, that the that chaos can be held at bay with the right technique and tools, and um we're sort of not uh subject to to the the the wheels of fortune.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: Um and that's certainly not what you get in Alice, and and I think I think that might be good in some ways, because the world is chaotic and you when one has to find one's way in it.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: Um and um and so I think I think the things that might put off some people about Alice in Wonderland are actually the things that they should enjoy about it, um, or at the very least, as as Lewis would say, you know, they they might not be right, but they were wrong in different ways.
30:09
SPEAKER_00: And so it's interesting to see the ways in which Lewis's age might have been right or wrong about these things.
30:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
30:18
SPEAKER_02: Well, so all of this brings us back to the question of like, what is this children's book doing?
30:25
SPEAKER_02: And we think of this as a children's book, but um I appreciated um how historian Tim Larson has observed that the concept, like the very concept of children's literature, really begins not too long before Carol was writing.
30:40
SPEAKER_02: Larson considers uh George MacDonald the pioneer of children's literature with his novels The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdy, which are classics that perhaps only uh homeschoolers today read, but probably more people should.
30:55
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but what ages would you say Carol's book is really best for right now?
31:02
SPEAKER_02: And what is the age that we think he was targeting originally?
31:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I think from what I've read, I think he was targeting a fairly young boys and girls with with this book.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: Um I think, you know, certainly as an adult, I I find much in there that I wonder if um, you know, if there's so much for me in it, uh is it is it then proper for a child?
31:31
SPEAKER_00: Is it is sort of um snooty in the way that many of the characters are snooty in in this book, where um, you know, Humpty Dumpty goes about, so again, we mentioned uh the jabberwocky.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: It's a nonsense poem, it doesn't mean anything at all.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: Um but Alice takes this poem to Humpty Dumpty and he goes in in very officious tones to explain line by line what each word means and the exact correlation, you know, and first of all, no poetry works in this kind of way, no good poetry works in this kind of direct or correlation kind of way, but certainly no nonsense poetry works in this way whatsoever.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: And um, and so, you know, is at its worst, you could imagine that this book is is um doing something like Humpty Dumpty.
32:16
SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's the case at all.
32:18
SPEAKER_00: I think it um, you know, having just read it with my children, they enjoy it.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: And so I don't think it's like um there's an essay that uh we've we emailed about a little bit that Tara uh Theke, I think is how you pronounce her name, wrote that that too many children's books these days just engage in complete subversion.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: There's they're they they tear down and they never build a thing.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: And so it's all kind of deconstruction, it's all uh critique, it's all um she she worries about how much it's making fun of what it means to be human and these different things.
32:51
SPEAKER_00: Um if that's true of Lewis Carroll today, which I don't think it is, it's only by by context of we swung too far in a in a certain direction.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: In in Lewis Carroll's day, you know, he was uh responding to kind of Victorian excesses of propriety, where theoretically, you know, every even uh table leg had to be covered with a a table skirt.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, this is obviously exaggeration of the robbing on the ground.
33:22
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, we ought to be grateful for uh Victorian sensibilities that we've inherited.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: They uh surely are a shield against many, many um uh different sins or or temptations that we might otherwise face, if not for our our prudish Victorian forebears.
33:37
SPEAKER_00: Um, but that said, you know, he was responding to a real thing of the um the sense that all children's instruction needs to be quite morally serious.
33:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, you were saying before, yeah, but there was a time when children's there was no such thing as children's literature, because children were seen as uh just miniature adults.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: And you can look at certain medieval art and you can see in some Christ paintings, for example, Jesus looks very strange.
34:05
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, it is an adult face on a tiny body, and it it's it's strange.
34:10
SPEAKER_00: Only later do you start to get art in which children are depicted as children and they have children's clothes and they look distinct from parents.
34:18
SPEAKER_00: There's a great essay by the sociologist uh James Davison Hunter, again an EA professor, Wither Adulthood, all about this transformation.
34:26
SPEAKER_00: And and Hunter says that these concept of childhood that we now take for granted was a cultural achievement.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: Um it came in the centuries leading up to um exactly these children's stories that we've we've talked about, but the the the place of leisure, the the move away from subsistence work and subsistence wages so that children could have the ability to go to school and be educated, these are all cultural achievements that allowed for things like children's literature and whimsy to to thrive.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: And it again, it might be the case that we've gone too far from the seriousness that the world requires of us, um that nature and reality require of us.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: But they are nevertheless, this was a cultural achievement, and and um it shouldn't be dismissed.
35:10
SPEAKER_00: It was the work of centuries of economic growth, of of cultural institutions that allowed for the kind of leisure that allows for learning.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh, and actually on that point, I think one thing I wonder a lot about, and I think you would have thoughts on this, is it seems like you need to be a fairly educated person to really truly enjoy, and we've already touched on this with C.S.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: Lewis and J.R.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: Tolkien, to enjoy all there is to enjoy in Lewis Carroll.
35:39
SPEAKER_00: And I think my sense is that British schoolboys and schoolgirls would have had a leg up in many different ways over, you know, their contemporary, um, especially American schoolboy and school, schoolgirl, um, you know, those who came after, in that um to know what an archbishop is and to do uh, you know this concept of dry humor or um the different poems that Alice knows and fumbles and gets wrong all the time, it's only funny because um you know people would know what these poems were in the first place.
36:13
SPEAKER_00: And so again, it comes to this balance between construction and and deconstruction.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: Um the the humor is in um noticing this this observed thing in the world.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: And if if people aren't creating those institutions or educating human beings to know that um Virgil is good, any any parody of him is going to not land.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: There's there's um nothing there.
36:38
SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, I think I I think it was certainly worked well as as children's literature.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: There's a reason we still read it.
36:48
SPEAKER_00: I do wonder if we've lost something and that we've we've um we've learned, we've overlearned certain lessons from Lewis Carroll.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: Um, and and it's not his fault at all.
36:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, but the there's some kind of balance between logic and madness that he knew and he could do so well um because he he cared for logic.
37:08
SPEAKER_00: He he he worshipped the the Lagos.
37:11
SPEAKER_02: Well, and it kind of astounds me that a mathematician wrote this.
37:15
SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't think we we have paid enough attention to that.
37:18
SPEAKER_02: A mathematician wrote this book.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: A mathematician from a very serious religious household.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: And so you mentioned, you know, the the Liddell Scott um, which you know I didn't even actually realize that was the same Liddell.
37:33
SPEAKER_02: Um David Kovacs told me that first semester at 2 VA.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: We we use we use this all the time still, too.
37:41
SPEAKER_00: I uh I'm um you know, sometimes a physical book, but sometimes I'll go online and and find it there.
37:46
SPEAKER_00: Um uh but but Lewis Carroll's father, so um um he was was a uh a big contributor to the Oxford movement.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, he's a tractarian.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: He was um, you know, people often uh think of the Oxford movement of John Henry Newman, um, but when he converts to the Roman Catholic Church, uh the the big leader of the movement is Edward Pusi, who is a college friend of Lewis Carroll's father.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: And so he grows up in a church in which these tracts are are um read and these things are thought about.
38:20
SPEAKER_00: Um his father was very serious about public baptism as opposed to private baptism and recovering these acts of the church.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: And um Lewis Carroll, as a deacon, you know, has all these these things and sees this whimsy as connected to this greater thing.
38:35
SPEAKER_00: And so whimsy for him in his age is very, I think, different than whimsy for ours, where rather than this holy laughter uh has become just, yeah, again, this this psychedelic confusion and fog.
38:50
SPEAKER_02: So if we miss the fact that the spiritual world is very much a part of his imagination, even for children's books, we're missing part of the point here.
39:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
39:01
SPEAKER_02: So, what is the purpose even of children's literature, like as we get bigger, whether what Carol was hoping to achieve with children's literature and what we're getting now from children's literature?
39:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think I think Carol thought that children, children's delight is a good thing in itself.
39:21
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, in simple uh and and what you have to appreciate is um as I I don't have the numbers for for the uh British school system, but so um so um the the Alice books are written mid-19th century, right?
39:39
SPEAKER_00: Um you've got as late as 1910 in the US, less than 10% of adults have graduated from high school.
39:48
SPEAKER_00: And so you are at such a far removed from our sense of of leisure, um, and and um the ability to put away hard things that uh the ability to just it'd be like going to the uh a third world country and just telling jokes.
40:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh a place where you know that these things probably happen, um but there's not it it's very different than than doing so uh, you know, when one has you know knows very few people who have died, um, when uh, you know, especially um early childhood deaths, which would have been a much more thing, to to take the time to to try and give children joy um in a culture in which so many would be lost very early in in childhood, if not infancy, is a very different act, I think, in in Carol's day than than ours.
40:41
SPEAKER_00: And I again this comes to the balance between kind of chaos and um order, um delight and seriousness.
40:49
SPEAKER_00: I think we've gotten so far away from seriousness, um so far away from death and hardship that we don't have the right balance.
40:56
SPEAKER_00: We kind of have a sickly sweet sense of of what Windsor is.
41:01
SPEAKER_02: That's striking.
41:03
SPEAKER_02: So I guess kind of on a related note, you're a parent, but you're also a public policy analyst.
41:09
SPEAKER_02: So you get to think about children's books from both uh a public angle and a very personal one at home.
41:16
SPEAKER_02: So, how do you select books for your children?
41:18
SPEAKER_02: And what have been some of the favorites in your household?
41:21
SPEAKER_00: I don't know that I have any profound insight from my work in public policy on these things.
41:27
SPEAKER_00: I I wish that I did.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, and you could talk, and I'm surely people could talk about these various policy wars that are waged over what books are in a library.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: And for many people, I think that's a, you know, I can't believe that we're spending so much time on that.
41:41
SPEAKER_00: And without litigating the merits of one side or the other on these things, I think it's actually exactly right.
41:46
SPEAKER_00: I think um whether or not the the the specific fights that we're having are the right ones, I think the seriousness with which we should take what books are available to children, what what books are given to children and encouraged to children to read is very, very important.
42:02
SPEAKER_00: Because I I think um my wife will make fun of me for this, but I I think we learn our morals in large part through animals, through through stories about talking animals.
42:13
SPEAKER_00: It's always been a noncy or these different things where we learn from animals how to be humans.
42:19
SPEAKER_00: And and uh that's you know a long, long history, again, as you know, of how human beings have learned how to be human is by by reading stories about animals.
42:31
SPEAKER_00: And um and so I think what we do with our animals is is important too.
42:37
SPEAKER_00: And the so the stories we tell ourselves with our actions with our animals is important.
42:41
SPEAKER_00: And I I I can't help but wonder, again, this is to get a bit abstract, but whether the kind of growing wave of things like physician-assisted suicide could come back to this.
42:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, we do this to our animals and we call this a compassionate thing.
42:55
SPEAKER_00: Is it how could it not then be a compassionate thing when we do it to ourselves?
42:59
SPEAKER_00: If in fact it is true that we learn our morals from um how we interact with animals in in stories and in real life.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, so there's that.
43:07
SPEAKER_00: That you know, that might totally be false, and there's some other kind of cultural explanation of of why we've had such changing um relationships to uh death and what it means to die well.
43:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think that's part of it too, in that you read um, you know, again, uh not Lewis Carroll, but C.S.
43:28
SPEAKER_00: Lewis's favorite book.
43:31
SPEAKER_00: It begins with knights fighting dragons.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: Um we've got a a little adaptation of a tiny part of the Fairy Queen, it's the longest work in the English language.
43:41
SPEAKER_00: Um we have like just an adaptation of the first part, St.
43:44
SPEAKER_00: George and the Dragon.
43:46
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's not all whimsy, right?
43:50
SPEAKER_00: Like, or whimsy is seriousness to go back to what we were saying before.
43:54
SPEAKER_00: It's important that we learn to fight dragons, and and this maybe gets to the violence point as well.
43:59
SPEAKER_00: It's it's important to Know what violence is for, what force is for, and what just force might look like in fighting and slaying dragons.
44:08
SPEAKER_00: We learn that there are evils, and we learn that there are right and wrong ways to use violence.
44:14
SPEAKER_00: The dragon is equally violent to the knight, but the knight's violence is good because it's directed towards the protection of the innocent.
44:22
SPEAKER_00: And um you can't learn that in a textbook.
44:26
SPEAKER_00: Um you might be able to learn that in a history, and I think histories are underappreciated as moral resources, but you certainly learn that in children's books about um, you know, how to the these very difficult situations.
44:40
SPEAKER_00: I mean, violence is a very bad and tragic thing.
44:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, so to learn, you know, and we should take it more seriously that in these books we we learn what good violence, um, just just force looks like.
44:54
SPEAKER_00: And and you know, you were talking, you were pushing back a little bit on this notion that we should take the queen's violence seriously.
44:59
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's exactly right.
45:00
SPEAKER_00: We it in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, we see how absurd the queen's request that everybody be beheaded are.
45:08
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, we see her servants um, you know, justly uh, you know, they they redirect the queen.
45:16
SPEAKER_00: She tells them, you know, asks them to dispatch some people, and um, Alice hides them away in a barrel, I believe.
45:23
SPEAKER_00: And um, and they mill about for a little bit, then go back, and the queen says, Well, have you done it?
45:28
SPEAKER_00: And they say something to to, you know, kind of like the Egyptian midwives in in the Exodus narrative to indicate that they'd maybe done this thing, but in fact, they'd spared their lives.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: And whether or not the deception is justified, the the refusing to carry out this unjust call to the use of force is exactly right.
45:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so there's, you know, it's sometimes hard to know which characters to learn lessons from in any given book.
45:54
SPEAKER_00: But I I think you can't read Alice and and not know that you're supposed to laugh at the queen and and find Alice's, you know, shielding of these would-be um beheaded servants as the right thing to do.
46:10
SPEAKER_02: And there's just so much absurdity surrounding them.
46:13
SPEAKER_02: I mean, like the scene where they're painting over um roses.
46:17
SPEAKER_02: It's like because they planted the wrong color, and so now they have to paint them over.
46:22
SPEAKER_02: It's like things like that where you think, even as a child, even if you don't know a whole lot about the world of plants, you know that you never do that in real life.
46:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
46:32
SPEAKER_00: And and I think we've our society might be too polite to recognize the absurd.
46:37
SPEAKER_00: That could be another place in which we we struggle as a society, that we are so inclusive.
46:42
SPEAKER_00: And again, these are cultural accomplishments, our our liberality, our um kind of um patience in in um disagreement and these different things are profoundly Christian achievements, and yet uh the excesses of them are spoiled fruits.
47:01
SPEAKER_00: And so um there are things that ought to be uh patently absurd to us that we refuse to call out as absurd.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: And again, without um being um dismissive or or or callous, uh I think certain things like the the God-given nature of gender is is an instance like this.
47:22
SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, um, I remember growing up at the swim team and we'd have genderbender days at the pool, and it was uh, you know, whether or not it was a wise thing to have children being dressed up in and the clothing of the opposite gender, it was clear to everybody, you know, uh as late as the 90s when I was growing up that this was a absurd thing to do because gender was such a um self-evident thing to to most everybody.
47:49
SPEAKER_00: We live in a culture where many of these things that we used to think were absurd, and I think fairly so, are no longer absurd.
47:56
SPEAKER_00: And and absurdity isn't an excuse to then be uh wicked and vile, um, certainly.
48:02
SPEAKER_00: But you know, you should always have compassion on on um the the madman, right?
48:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's um you don't you you know the queen is not it uh does never gets her just desserts, which would be to be but beheaded in turn.
48:18
SPEAKER_00: They are constantly redirecting her.
48:20
SPEAKER_00: And so um absurdity isn't license necessarily in all cases to to mock and and um revile.
48:27
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, we see that throughout Alice, where um you know different characters are are truly mean to Alice.
48:34
SPEAKER_00: Um they ask her what she wants to drink if she wants something to drink, and then she says, sure, that'd be great.
48:40
SPEAKER_00: And it turns out they don't have it at all.
48:41
SPEAKER_00: And it's clear that they've violated, even in this absurd fantasy land, they've they've violated, you know, pretty serious rules of of um hospitality.
48:52
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the other thing, too, is what you see mocked or not mocked is a really interesting thing in uh um Alice's adventures in Wonderland.
49:01
SPEAKER_00: You actually never see the concept of God mocked.
49:04
SPEAKER_00: You know, there's there's no mocking of religion.
49:06
SPEAKER_00: The closest any um you get to any mocking of religion is the the the dry story told to to dry poor, you know, near nearly teared round Alice, um, the story about the archbishop or or whatever.
49:18
SPEAKER_00: And but there's there's whimsy in the right places, there's this mockery of the right things, and I think that's good.
49:26
SPEAKER_00: Um, there's I can't remember if it was a Liz Brunig or or someone wrote a great piece on mocking the devil and and these um whether or not how how far they go back or don't, these Halloween traditions.
49:39
SPEAKER_00: Um that there's something right to uh finding absurd and mocking the right things, uh, even if in uh you know Christ and and and Christian faith calls us to do so judiciously, um to not um be wicked and vile and cruel, even as we we you know thumb our nose at the things we ought to thumb our nose at.
50:04
SPEAKER_02: And that's striking.
50:05
SPEAKER_02: Just again, kind of like subtle reminders of norms that these books are teaching children.
50:12
SPEAKER_02: And actually, that story about their archbishop, um, the mouse telling the story to dry Alice, um, I always assumed this was a parody of academia, that Lewis um Lewis Carroll here was mocking his very profession, that academics are so dry.
50:31
SPEAKER_02: Man, a lecture will dry you like nothing else.
50:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I I think that's totally right.
50:36
SPEAKER_00: And I think in um, you know, um uh people often described Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, as look, you know, he he um is is comes onto the scene too late to be mocked by John Tenuel's very fantastic illustrations in in the original Alice in Wonderland.
50:54
SPEAKER_00: Um but the you know, one of the the characters is is said, in fact, in different write-ups of of um Bertrand Russell, he's described as looking like this character from Alice in Wonderland.
51:07
SPEAKER_00: And and that's that's fitting because it's all it's kind of making fun of this.
51:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, what does and what does this word mean?
51:13
SPEAKER_00: Um what you know, how do we know what it means?
51:15
SPEAKER_00: And and these kind of excesses of academia that um, you know, someone like if you've ever read um Jonathan Strange and Mr.
51:24
SPEAKER_00: Norrell, oh yes, another very brilliant satire of academia, and where it it and these are right things to mock, not because education isn't important, not because um study and and serious discipline and that you know in a in the same direction isn't laudable, but there's a self-seriousness that needs to be mocked or it will become vice.
51:47
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's something that Alice knows that that we might not know so readily today.
51:53
SPEAKER_02: I love that.
51:54
SPEAKER_02: Well, as we conclude, one final question for you.
51:57
SPEAKER_02: What classic book, whether fiction or nonfiction, do you wish you had written and why?
52:05
SPEAKER_00: It's not Alice, because I I would never there's certain there's certain things that one knows that one could never do.
52:13
SPEAKER_00: And so it's not, you know, um, I I think someone might read Alice and mistake it as, well, anyone can be absurd in that kind of way.
52:20
SPEAKER_00: And and as we were saying, um, it actually takes a certain amount of erudition to be so consistently silly.
52:27
SPEAKER_00: Um, so I I I I don't wish that.
52:30
SPEAKER_00: I I I think I I wish that I if I could have written anything, I'll be quite vanilla and just say um, you know, the Chronicles of Narnia, maybe, maybe perhaps the line, the witch in the wardrobe, because it's so delightful.
52:44
SPEAKER_00: And to me, I think it means something.
52:47
SPEAKER_00: It's you know, again, we talked about these differences between Tolkien and Lewis, and Tolkien thinks that um the Chronicles of Narnia is a very unserious work because it's all over the place, and Father Christmas shows up in a world where it doesn't seem like he should belong.
53:02
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, there's there's theories why he does belong, and you should read them.
53:06
SPEAKER_00: But um, to me, it's just such a simple book.
53:12
SPEAKER_00: Um, it's such a uh accessible book that one can simply open a wardrobe and walk through and enter into this world that that Lewis has created.
53:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, and for me specifically, I think it means so much because it's the book that my dad read to me.
53:27
SPEAKER_00: Um I don't know that my dad's dad, my granddad, read him books growing up.
53:31
SPEAKER_00: He probably did, but um, my dad, I remember, told me that he went to uh a parenting class at his church.
53:40
SPEAKER_00: And they told him there that in order to bond with your children, you should read a book to them.
53:44
SPEAKER_00: And you know, he was a military kid, and so he's probably treated much more like these um um these pictures of uh children in the medieval ages where they are full-grown kids with seven-year-old bodies.
53:59
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, he worked with his dad at a um at a airport and and did a lot of mechanical work.
54:08
SPEAKER_00: Um but he he took the effort, he took the time to read this book to to me.
54:14
SPEAKER_00: And um it's a good book in itself, and I would have probably eventually at some point come along to it and and known how good it was, but he gave it to me earlier than I might have otherwise had it.
54:24
SPEAKER_00: And um, every time I read it, it's special because of that.
54:28
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, to then get to read that book to my children um is a precious thing to me.
54:34
SPEAKER_00: And um, and even recently, you know, our children are old enough to start reading these things.
54:40
SPEAKER_00: My dad is able to read to them the same books in the same chair in the same house that he read those books to me.
54:48
SPEAKER_00: Um and I think that's I think uh you know, there is something objective to whether a book is a classic in.
54:58
SPEAKER_00: Again, Chronicles and Arnia definitely counts as a classic.
55:01
SPEAKER_00: You've got the the Disney adaptation, after all, uh is a sure sign.
55:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm joking, um, in part.
55:08
SPEAKER_00: But uh certainly any book read to uh a child by one's parent with intention, um with that kind of care, will read like a classic to them, whether or not it merits it or not.
55:22
SPEAKER_00: That uh a parent can impart that kind of meaning to a book is, I think, a truly amazing thing.
55:30
SPEAKER_00: And it it could have just been, you know, Shell Silverstein's The Giving Tree, which, you know, uh is is not certainly not profound, though.
55:37
SPEAKER_00: I I do actually like it.
55:40
SPEAKER_00: But um it doesn't have to be any grand book.
55:45
SPEAKER_00: Any book that a parent takes the time to read to a child is is going to be special to that child ever thereafter.
55:53
SPEAKER_00: So I you for me it would be to to write that book and to be able to give that gift um to other families and to be the the occasion of of bonding between generations, um especially generations that don't fully know how to bond with their children and feel that they have to go to a parenting class to know how to to give their children something that might not have been given or or given in the same way um to the generation after them.
56:24
SPEAKER_02: That's really beautiful.
56:25
SPEAKER_02: And just what a reminder that books, especially children's books, they are relational.
56:31
SPEAKER_02: And that's what kids remember.
56:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we get to share the stories that matter to us with other people.
56:37
SPEAKER_02: Um I mean we joke.
56:39
SPEAKER_02: It's almost like you know, making memories.
56:42
SPEAKER_02: But like, yeah, that's that is making memories.
56:44
SPEAKER_02: Like it's uh yeah.
56:46
SPEAKER_00: And and maybe even more than that, that it's it's making every memory in light of that story.
56:53
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think um people get mocked all the time for this.
56:57
SPEAKER_00: Um you get told to read another book.
56:59
SPEAKER_00: Um, there was uh uh leading up to the 2016 election, again, not not weighing in on the merits of uh of this at all, but um there was there were so many essays and and things and posts about whether or not um Donald Trump or even maybe Hillary Clinton were Voldemort or Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter series.
57:20
SPEAKER_00: And it was clear that to a generation, my generation, um, younger millennials, they learn to think morally and even politically through reading the books of J.K.
57:32
SPEAKER_00: Rowling.
57:33
SPEAKER_00: Um, it would be good for them to read another book.
57:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, not because there's anything wrong with J.K.
57:38
SPEAKER_00: Rowling and Harry Potter, um, but because you know, these books give us language and and story with which to make sense of the rest of our lives with.
57:48
SPEAKER_00: And so there's something profoundly right, in fact, that um that we use things like Harry Potter to make sense of what's going on in our world and our country, and um and and that's not something that we should mock, I think.
58:03
SPEAKER_00: I think that's something profoundly important that we share stories with one another and they help us to understand the story that we live in.
58:11
SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you so much, John.
58:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
58:14
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for your time.
58:15
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for um even this, I think, in thinking carefully um and deliberately about a book um has has given it more meaning to me in just this conversation.
58:29
SPEAKER_02: I appreciate that.