asked Alice.
“Sometimes, just one second,” replied White Rabbit.
What does this mean to you?
[ETA: Mods, feel free to move this to Cafe Society since it regards a Lewis Carroll book.]
Times move in diverse ways among diverse people.
Or so I have heard. It is a subjective kind of thing.
“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.” Attributed to Albert Einstein, but possibly apocryphal.
Just a second and I’ll be back with an answer…
I don’t believe in destiny
Or the guiding hand of fate
I don’t believe in forever
Or love as a mystical state
I don’t believe in the stars or the planets
Or angels watching from above
But I believe there’s a ghost of a chance we can find someone to love
And make it last…
…
According to my then six year old son about 30 seconds…
Cite?
The time it will take until I meet the love of my life.
Forever is always one second away.
Time is relative. Lunchtime, doubly so.
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
It means pretty much the same thing as the book as a whole - Lewis Carroll was on drugs. A lot.
What book?
I don’t think that’s in Alice in Wonderland, or Through the Looking Glass.
Been a year since I’ve read the stories, I could be wrong.
It’s a drug called imagination. Amazing thing, it is.
I agree with aNewLeaf. Maybe it’s from a play adaptation, but I don’t find it in either of Carroll’s Alice books.
If it’s from Carroll, I’m curious to know how old he was at the time. Because as we age, time goes by much more quickly. Remember how long summer was when you were a kid? And now that I’m almost 68, it seems that just a couple of weeks ago the crocuses came up, and I was waiting for my magnolia tree to blossom.
Google just turns up a bunch of blogs which attribute the “quote” to Lewis Carroll without any further information.
It certainly doesn’t strike me as the kind of thing Carroll would write. I’m willing to bet that some would-be philosopher stuck the words in the mouths of Carroll’s characters, and somehow they got attributed to Carroll himself.
Whether or not it’s really a Carroll statement:
A forever second can refer to an unbearable event, or it can refer to the time it takes to make a life altering decision or witness a life-altering event. Depends on how metaphorical you want to make it. For me, the second before brain death under the right conditions could give rise to a time-dilated state of consciousness governed only by the laws of dreams.
Relative time is a more modern invention anyway, Einsteinian in a way Carroll’s works were not.