o a game of chess. There are problems of relativity, as in her exchange with the Cheshire Cat:"Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?""That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."There is plenty of fodder for psychoanalysts, Freudian or otherwise, who havehad a field day analyzing the significance of the myriad dream creatures and Alice's strange transformations. There is even Zen: "And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out..."Still, why would a rigorous logical thinker like Dodgson, a disciple of mathematics, wish children to wander in an unpredictable land of the absurd? Maybe he felt that everybody, including himself, needed an occasional holiday from dry mental exercises. But he was no doubt also aware that nonsense can be instructive all the same. As Alice and the children who follow her adventures recognize illogical events, they are acknowledging their capacity for logic, in the form of what should normally happen."You're a serpent; [says the Pigeon] and there's no use denying it. I suppose you'll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!""I have tasted eggs, certainly," said Alice... "But little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know."Ethel Rowell, to whom Dodgson taught logic when she was young, wrote that she was grateful that he had encouraged her to "that arduous business of thinking." While Lewis Carroll's Alice books compel us to laugh and to wonder, we are also easily led, almost in spite of ourselves, to think as well....
