Time & Perspective Quote by Lewis Carroll

A walrus announcing its own agenda is already a joke about power: the creature is absurd, but it speaks with the ceremonious certainty of a statesman. Carroll’s genius is to stage “serious talk” as a shopping list of nonsense, then let the rhythm do the convincing. “The time has come” is pure parliamentary thunder, the kind of phrase that usually prefaces policy, war, or moral reckoning. What follows is a tumble of objects that refuse to line up into meaning: shoes and ships (the everyday and the epic), sealing wax (bureaucratic pomp), cabbages (domestic banality), kings (authority itself). The line works because it parodies the way grand language can launder emptiness into importance.

In context, it’s from “The Walrus and the Carpenter” in Through the Looking-Glass, a poem that pretends to be a whimsical digression while quietly modeling a darker lesson: eloquence as misdirection. The walrus’s talk precedes exploitation; he and the Carpenter will flatter and coax the oysters toward their doom. So the pileup of topics isn’t random, it’s cover. By promising “many things,” the walrus performs intellectual range, the all-purpose credential of the confident speaker. The dash-heavy cadence mimics improvisational charm, as if the mind is so fertile it can’t help but overflow.

Subtext: beware the charismatic voice that can make anything sound like it belongs in the same sentence. Carroll isn’t mocking curiosity; he’s skewering the slick authority of the one who controls what counts as “the conversation.”