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“Perhaps it was an indulgence on my part – moving to a bungalow next to the model village. It’s true that when I sat puffing on my pipe, watching my son and daughter move about amongst the four-foot-high, half-timbered-semis, I would feel transported, taken back to my own childhood. It was the confusion in scale that allowed for this. For if the model village was to scale, my children would be at least sixty feet tall. Easily big enough, and competent enough, to re-parent me.”
Will Self, Grey Area (1994)
“The King of England viewed by a hypothetical creature much larger would appear correspondingly small; but so, for that matter, would the larger person in a similar plight – as indeed Gulliver himself does in Book II… So a sequence of bigger and bigger people can be imagined indefinitely. Swift has therefore in playing with size said precisely nothing… Pride has been condemned, not by the author but by the reader.”
G. Wilson Knight, Swift and the Symbolism of Irony (1968).
“‘I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir,’ said Alice, ‘because I'm not myself, you see.’ ‘I don't see,’ said the Caterpillar. ‘I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,’ Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.’ ‘It isn't,’ said the Caterpillar.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).