Alice in Wonderland

While my father was still alive, during the year of his cancer, this is what I would recite to myself when I needed to steel or compose myself:

"The ant's a dragon in his centaur world
Pull down thy vanity.
It is not man made courage, nor made order, nor made life,
Pull down!"

It's from Ezra Pound's cantos and has served me well.

Now that my father is gone, the passage I continue to go back to is in Chapter 1 of Alice in Wonderland:

"First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; "for it might end, you know," said Alice to herself; "in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?" And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing."

I was in the room when Dad released his last breath, and this is what I thought to myself. To this moment I find myself continuing to wonder what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out...

Lewis Carrol's use of the word "fancy" fascinates me. At some point, I will have to address the role of imagination in ethics -- as the central panel in the triptych that includes interpretation and empathy.

Fancy, interpretation, empathy. "Fancy" as opposed to "imagination" because the former strikes me as suggesting something less willed, something open to channels beyond our own cause and effect.

Side note: The beginning and end of the Greek alphabet is "alpha" and "omega" -- both are gates to the world. "Alpha" is the barred gate because the alphabet must be learned, but to the Greek mind, Omega is the open portal because through language we reach out to both the physical world and the humanly infinite (that is, the humanly inexhaustable -- only a nihilist could believe in an absolute infinite).

It is a very small and subtle difference, but no accident I think that in English both gates are barred -- "A" and "Z". We use our language to bottle things up, to separate and isolate, to our loss.