Alice and Lyra - A Rambling

She yearned to feel like Alice,

But her destiny was to feel like Lyra.



Fear is the underlying impetus that drives so many people down certain paths. Fear of separation, pain, destitution, loneliness, boredom, age, and probably most of all death. Many more can be added to this list.

How wonderful it would be to treat life like an adventure through Wonderland. After all, the Earth is wonderful.

But being human, being a conscious being, requires us to respond in our lives as a social animal, with corresponding emotional responses linked to our basic underlying fears and longings. The longings seem to arise out of our wish to be free of our fears.

Locked within our bodies, our thinking mostly hidden from others, our outward version of ourselves so often seems undeveloped, incorrect in some way. Thoughts are modified for public consumption. Our visible appearance so often belies how we feel.


William Blake tells us that our understanding unfolds through our direct experience of living. Learning through reading, looking at art, watching films, listening to music, together with our daily interaction with the physical world, people and other living creatures, is how we evolve spiritually.


The doing, the living, our choices, our response to our situation, are all informed by this mix of life experience and our reflection upon it by trying to understand other perceptions of it. If we are blessed with longevity, our understanding gets more chance to evolve.



I am strongly drawn to the characters of Lewis Carroll's Alice and Philip Pullman's Lyra.


I would like to feel as Alice seems to do in her adventures, amazed, surprised and full of wonder at the often disconcerting situations she finds herself in. Here is a child's wonder, but a child who feels safe even in the midst of potential danger. Her attitude towards intimidating or hostile creatures or dangerous situations is to consider them absurd. We are soothed, along with her, by the overwhelming impression that this is all a dream and things will fade and change at any moment, that is the fundamental law of nature, even when ordinary logic or physics seem to have been suspended or warped in some way. Here is the scientist's brain, the artist's imagination, the writer's universe. Anything can happen and we respond to it with curiosity, embracing it's wonder, rather than letting it's strangeness or apparent volatility worry us. This is the ultimate " good trip ", for it is, after all, a psychadelic dream.


Discovering Lyra, I felt I knew her better. Her apparent fearlessness in the face of adversity, her strong sense of right and wrong. The way she led her gang with courage borne out of her will to do the right thing, the way they followed because of her passion and strength. She is good, but not perfect. She is wayward, rebellious, questioning, inquisitive, a tomboy, but enjoys dressing up and is entranced by beauty.

Lyra's deep attachment and love for her daemon defines a feeling inside that is incomprehensible. For my own part, I perceive it as love. Love seems to exist within us independently. We draw from it as if it was a well of water when we love others and even things or ideas, but, like the daemon who is so much a part of all the characters in The Northern Lights trilogy, love is there, within us, by our side, directing us, but also, somehow, interacting with us.

Lyra follows her destiny willingly, though sorrowfully, even to Hell and her final separation from Will, her soul-mate. She has wonderful adventures along the way. She experiences fear, discovers deep love for many others and forges unbreakable bonds with those on the same path. She sacrifices her own happiness for the greater good and for those she loves because she could not be happy otherwise. Who would not recognise this as the story arc of the life of a woman who has found her path. It may be set in another world, full of magic and unfamiliar things, but the way she feels and behaves seems familiar. She is who we aspire to be and her battles are ours. Fear may be lurking, but our destiny drives us through it.