of Alice's journey to a game of chess. There are problems ofrelativity, as in her exchange with the Cheshire Cat: "Wouldyou 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 orotherwise, who have had a field day analyzing thesignificance of the myriad dream creatures and Alice'sstrange transformations. There is even Zen: "And she tried tofancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle isblown out..." Still, why would a rigorous logical thinker likeDodgson, a disciple of mathematics, wish children to wanderin an unpredictable land of the absurd? Maybe he felt thateverybody, including himself, needed an occasional holidayfrom dry mental exercises. But he was no doubt also awarethat nonsense can be instructive all the same. As Alice andthe children who follow her adventures recognize illogicalevents, they are acknowledging their capacity for logic, inthe form of what should normally happen. "You're a serpent;[says the Pigeon] and there's no use denying it. I supposeyou'll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!" "Ihave tasted eggs, certainly," said Alice... "But little girls eateggs quite as much as serpents do, you know." EthelRowell, to whom Dodgson taught logic when she wasyoung, wrote that she was grateful that he had encouragedher to "that arduous business of thinking." While LewisCarroll's Alice books compel us to laugh and to wonder, weare also easily led, almost in spite of ourselves, to think aswell. ...
