»Who are you?«
»I—I hardly know, madam,
just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning,
but I think I must have been changed several times since then.«

Alice’s breakneck fall down the rabbit hole and the endless descent that brings her to Wonderland is due to her sense of the real, external world – the world organized according to its own order, rules, pressures, principles and the sense of being taken for granted. It is the world that bores and oppresses Alice immensely. The Wonderland she finds herself in opens a new perspective – it shows her a view of a world where the established order is turned upside down and beyond, a world that is constantly changing, getting smaller and bigger, growing and disappearing, a world where the laws of absurdity, mutability and nonsense apply. Alice’s leap down the rabbit hole is in fact an escape from the conformity of society, an escape from boredom and stasis into imagination, adventure and excitement.
But what if Alice jumps down the rabbit hole again? What if she jumps down several times? What if she finds herself in it when she grows up? Is there anything left for her to find? Where and what is Wonderland today – in a time that does not know and is unable to tolerate silence, in a time that denies the existence of boredom, in a time when, even when you are doing nothing, you are constantly preoccupied by all kinds of images and thoughts? In this unbearable time of attractions, has Wonderland also become unbearable?
The journey down the rabbit hole, if we choose to take it when we grow up, is no longer straightforward and easy, but possibly dangerous, scary, constraining and requiring courage. But in a world of radical feeling of being lost and feeling being lost daily, it may be a leap upside down – to reach oneself – the right step to look at the world again from the other side and decide where, if anywhere, we should go.
Or, as the Cheshire Cat answered Alice’s question about which way to go:
»It depends a lot on where you want to go.«
Luka Marcen