Column 01: A reflection on Wonderland

Maybe Alice wasn't so wrong

Larger than the world, and twice as natural

Lewis Carroll

Wonderland is more than a land of nonsense - it’s a place where reality becomes pliable and the impossible seems reasonable. In “Alice’s adventures in Wonderland,” Lewis Carroll built [a world] “larger than the world, and twice as natural” a landscape blurring the lines between logic and imagination. Perhaps the truest strangeness is not Wonderland itself, but the relentless certainty with which we cling to our own rules aboveground.​

Alice isn’t just a visitor in a topsy-turvy world; she’s a mirror held up to our own questions about boundaries and meaning. Each arbitrary rule in Wonderland is an echo of our own reality - commands shouted by queens with little reason, endless races without true direction, and games where the rules dissolve the moment we begin to understand them. When Alice wonders if she is “wrong,” it is the tremor of self-doubt that echoes in every one of us who has ever questioned reality, who has ever wondered: What if our so-called delusions are simply misunderstood truths?​

Maybe Alice wasn’t wrong at all. Maybe, like Alice, the act of questioning - the push against the brittle walls of what we’re told to believe - is itself a natural, even necessary, response to a baffling world. When reality stretches, and becomes “larger” and stranger than it should, perhaps that is when we are truly awake - seeing without pretense or restriction. In a world twice as natural it is authenticity and curiosity that rise above conformity, and wonder begins in the quiet refusal to accept things just because they are told to us. Wonderland, after all, only seems absurd until we recognize how closely it reflects the world we already live in.