"Curiouser and Curiouser!" cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English)...
... this happens in Lewis Carroll's novel
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland",
written in 1865.
(It's all here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/alice-II.html)
Nowadays, more and more often I also would like to cry out like Alice:
Curiouser and Curiouser!
😉
I came across a very beautiful German edition of "Alice im Wunderland" and "Alice hinter den Spiegeln" (Gerstenberg 2015, with lovely illustrations by Floor Rieder). Holding this beautiful copy in hand, I - again - felt drawn to the strange, weird, dreamlike atmosphere which is created in Lewis Carroll's novels ...
... and I started to make some bookmarks.
I tried to make them in a somewhat peculiar way, after I have met all these strange creatures, coming out of chess and card games, or the mad Hatter or the Cheshire Cat or the Gryphon or Bill the Lizzard... just to name a few. And the door! How important is the door which opens to the beautiful garden!
My favorite scene of the whole story is this here:
"Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the little glass table. `Now, I'll manage better this time,' she said to herself, and began by taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that led into the garden. Then she went to work nibbling at the mushroom (she had kept a piece of it in her pocket) till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little passage: and then--she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains."
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/alice-VII.html
(pictured here is a page with the beautiful original illustration by John Tenniel, in:
Lewis Carroll, Alice im Wunderland, insel taschenbuch 2161, 1998)
Isn't it all about such a little golden key -
once you have found out how to reach the right height to grab it from the three-legged glass table?
And then to be able to walk through this door??
To get into the beautiful garden?
