Explanation:
Being young is overrated. Being old is underrated. Being in the middle is middle-rated. The only reason people don't pass smoothly—with acceptance, dignity, and age-appproriate rewards and responsibilities—from one stage to the next is because modern societies don't value humans. They value images and synthetic versions of how people should behave and act and buy—created by the diseased reality-distortion field of the media. All people are seen as throwaway, and once they reach a certain age, they have little value. Wisdom is for naught. And even youth is nothing unless bartered in some way in a marketplace of masks and images. All people are victims of this, at least until they see it and resist. Resist being made and seen as a cartoon of a human. You are fully human and just right for your age and perfect for who you are at every moment all the time throughout your life.
Some critics feel that Alice's personality and her waking life are reflected in Wonderland; that may be the case. But the story itself is independent of Alice's "real world." Her personality, as it were, stands alone in the story, and it must be considered in terms of the Alice character in Wonderland.
A strong moral consciousness operates in all of Alice's responses to Wonderland, yet on the other hand, she exhibits a child's insensitivity in discussing her cat Dinah with the frightened Mouse in the pool of tears. Generally speaking, Alice's simplicity owes a great deal to Victorian feminine passivity and a repressive domestication. Slowly, in stages, Alice's reasonableness, her sense of responsibility, and her other good qualities will emerge in her journey through Wonderland and, especially, in the trial scene. Her list of virtues is long: curiosity, courage, kindness, intelligence, courtesy, humor, dignity, and a sense of justice. She is even "maternal" with the pig/baby. But her constant and universal human characteristic is simple wonder — something which all children (and the child that still lives in most adults) can easily identify with
Answer:
In this passage, Willis is expressing that literature is a message from the past telling us about the lives of those before us. We are told that these messages are trying to tell us how we live and how we die based on others experiences. Willis tries to explain this through a concerned, yet passionate tone that urges us, the readers, to learn from the mistakes and the fortunes of the lives of people before us. We can only do this through literature, as it is the gateway to seeing how the world works.
