For Maria das Graças

Now that you have reached the advanced age of 15, Maria da Graça, I give you this book: Alice in Wonderland. This book is crazy, Maria. That is: its meaning is within you. Listen: if you do not discover a meaning in madness, you will end up mad.

Learn, therefore, as you set out on your great life, to read this book as a simple manual of the evident meaning of all things, including the crazy ones. Learn this in your own way, because I am giving you only a few keys among the thousands that open the doors of reality.

Reality, Maria, is crazy. Not even the Pope, no one in the world, can answer without blinking the question that Alice asks the kitten: "Tell me the truth, Dinah, have you ever eaten a bat?" Don't be surprised when the world dawns unrecognizable. For better or worse, this happens many times a year. "Who am I in the world?"

This perplexing question is a commonplace in every human story. The more times you solve this riddle, as ingrained in you as your bones, the stronger you will become. It doesn't matter what the answer is; the important thing is to give or invent an answer. Even if it's a lie.

Loneliness (forget that word I just accidentally invented) is inevitable. That's what Alice said at the bottom of the well: "I'm so tired of being here all alone!" The important thing is that she managed to get out of there, opening the door. The door of the well! Only human creatures (not even great apes and trained dogs) can open a tightly closed door or vice versa, that is, close a wide open door. We are all so foolish, Mary.

We perform a trivial action, and we have the petulant presumption of expecting great consequences from it. When Alice ate the cake and didn't grow in size, she was in the greatest astonishment. Although that is what usually happens to people who eat cake. Mary, there is a social or pocket wisdom; not all wisdom has to be serious.

We are always making mistakes in relation to others and the way to do it is to apologize seven times a day: "Oh, I beg your pardon." Because living is like talking about rope in a hanged man's house. That's why I tell you, for your pocket wisdom: if you like cats, try the mouse's point of view. That's what the mouse asked Alice: "Would you like a cat if you were me?"

Men are always betting on races, Maria. In offices, in business, in national and international politics, in clubs, in bars, in the arts, in literature, even friends, even siblings, even husbands and wives, even lovers, everyone is always betting on races. They are such confusing competitions, so full of tricks, so unnecessary, so pretending that it isn't, so ridiculous often, through such hidden paths, that when the athletes reach a point exhausted, they usually ask: "The race is over! But who won?"

It's silly, Maria da Graça, to compete in a race if we're not going to know who won. If you have to go somewhere, don't worry about the tiring vanity of being the first to arrive. If you always get where you want to go, you've won.

Said the little mouse: "My story is long and sad!" You'll hear it thousands of times. Just as you'll hear the terrible variation: "My life would make a novel." Now, since all lives lived to the end are long and sad, and since all lives would make novels, since a novel is only the way to tell a life, run away, politely but energetically, from the men and women who sigh and say: "My life would make a novel!" Especially from men. Incurable bores, Maria.

Miracles always happen in each and every one's life. But, contrary to what people think, the best and most profound miracles don't happen suddenly, but slowly, very slowly. I mean this: the word depression will fall out of fashion sooner or later. Since it may be later, prepare yourself for the monster's visit, and don't despair at Alice's sad thought: "I must be shrinking again." Somewhere there are mushrooms that make us grow again.

And listen to the perfect parable: Alice had shrunk so much in size that she mistook a mouse for a hippopotamus. This happens a lot, Mary. But let's not be naive, because the opposite also happens. And it's another English writer who tells us something like this: the mouse we expelled yesterday has today become a terrible rhinoceros. That's right. Our soul is a complicated machine that produces during our lifetime an immense quantity of mice that look like hippos and rhinoceroses that look like mice. The trick is to laugh at the first confusion and be well prepared to face the rhinoceros that has entered our domain disguised as a mouse.

And since mistaking small for big and big for small is always a bit comical, we should never lose our good humor. Everyone should have three boxes to store humor: a large box for the more or less cheap humor that we spend on the street with others; a medium box for the humor that we need to have when we are alone, to forgive yourself, to laugh at yourself; finally, a precious little box, very hidden, for great occasions. I call great occasions the dangerous moments in which we are full of pain or vanity, in which we are tempted to think that we have failed or triumphed, in which we feel like drugs or very cool. Be careful, Maria, with great occasions.

Finally, one more word for the pocket: sometimes a person abandons himself to such a way to suffering, with such complacency, that he is afraid of not being able to get out of it. Pain also has its spell, and this turns against the bewitched.

That is why Alice, after having cried a lake, thought: "Now I will be punished, drowning in my own tears". Conclusion: pain itself must have its measure: It is ugly, it is immodest, it is vain, it is dangerous to cross the border of our pain, Maria da Graça.

Beijim 💋