We go to entertainments, such as the theatre - I saw ‘we’, for I also go to the play, whenever I get a chance of seeing a really good one - and keep at arm’s length, if possible, the thought that we may not return alive. Yet how do you know - dear friend, whose patience has carried you through this garrulous preface - that it may not be your lt, when mirth is fastest and most furious, to feel the sharp pang, or the deadly faintness, which heralds the final crisis - to see, with vague wonder, anxious friends bending over you - to hear their troubled whispers - perhaps yourself to shape the question, with trembling lips, “Is it serious?” and to be told “Yes: the end is near” (and oh, how different all Life will look when those words are said!) - how do you know, I say, that all this may not happen to you, this night?
And dare you, knowing this, say to yourself “Well, perhaps it is an immoral play: perhaps the situations are a little too ‘risky’, the dialogue a little too strong, the ‘business’ a little to suggestive. I don’t say that conscience is quite easy: but the piece is so clever, I must see it this once! I’ll begin a stricter life to-morrow.” To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.
Let me pause for a moment to say that I believe this thought, of the possibility of death - if calmly realized, and steadily faced - would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.
- Lewis Carroll
