The Looking Glass & A Golden Key

I don’t know about you, but as a young child engrossed in reading the children’s classics like Alice in Wonderland, I always assumed that the Looking Glass was meant merely as a mysterious and adventurous journey back to the past where things were more simple and there was intrigue around every corner.

Now as an adult, journeying through this uncertain and chaotic world as we watch events play out around us, I long for that childhood Looking Glass to take me away deep into forests of wonder and intrigue.

To where?

Well, rolling green hills would be a start. Animals foraging among the thistles and ferns. Fairies playing at the bottom of the garden. Flowers lining simple dirt roads. Low stone walls edging their way along the sides of paths and hills. Trees with canopies big enough to house small families. Dreams. What would we do without them?

We eventually discover that life throws more challenges in our paths as we get older, but they need not be dismissed as thorns that are out to prickle us into a sad and lonely demise. Sure, that takes practice, but it is the only option. The alternative will only land us in a pit of utter despair. To grow we must break. Just look at how the trees rejuvenate when their branches break.

So, back to that Looking Glass with all of its promises of magic and fairy dust.

Of course, the world Alice entered was not merely representative of fun, and that deeper meanings relate to entry into such a place. Things such as insight into oneself and the world; a discovery that can only be made while out of one’s everyday environment; a portal into a world where things are reversed in the hope we can see that which we could not from our current place.

But a portal it is for whatever reason we end up going through it.

All of this reminded me of a short fairy tale written by the Brothers Grimm called The Golden Key.

It is a story of a young boy who was sent out into the icy cold weather to fetch wood and found a small golden key, which then led him to search for a box to which it surely must belong. The intrigue got the better of him. But the lure of this story is that it has no ending - it is up to the reader to construct their own. I thought it fitting to include it here as a reminder that we can all still search out mystery in times of hardship because we never know what we will find.

“In the winter time, when deep snow lay on the ground, a poor boy was forced to go out on a sled to fetch wood. When he had gathered it together, and packed it, he wished, as he was so frozen with cold, not to go home at once, but to light a fire and warm himself a little. So he scraped away the snow, and as he was thus clearing the ground, he found a tiny, gold key. Hereupon he thought that where the key was, the lock must be also, and dug in the ground and found an iron chest. ‘If the key does but fit it!’ thought he; ‘no doubt there are precious things in that little box.’ He searched, but no keyhole was there. At last he discovered one, but so small that it was hardly visible. He tried it, and the key fitted it exactly. Then he turned it once round, and now we must wait until he has quite unlocked it and opened the lid, and then we shall learn what wonderful things were lying in that box.”

(From Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Household Tales, trans. Margaret Hunt (London: George Bell, 1884)

What will you find through your Looking Glass?