In logic class, I opened my textbook — the last place I was expecting to find comic inspiration — and was startled to find that Lewis Carroll, the supremely witty author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was also a logician. He wrote logic textbooks and included argument forms based on the syllogism, normally presented in logic books this way: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. _________________________________ Therefore, Socrates is mortal. But Carroll’s were more convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way: 1) Babies are illogical. 2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile. 3) Illogical persons are despised. __________________________________________ Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles. And: 1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste. 2) No modern poetry is free from affectation. 3) All your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles. 4) No affected poetry is popular among people of taste. 5) Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles. __________________________________________ Therefore, all your poems are uninteresting.

I do not know if 'Alice in Wonderland' was an original story — I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it — but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen story-books have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea' — is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.

To have known the man was even as great a treat as to read his books. Lewis Carroll was as unlike any other man as his books were unlike any other author's books. It was a relief to meet the pure simple, innocent dreamer of children, after the selfish commercial mind of most authors.

I do love Alice in Wonderland though, that's something I think I could do very well. Don't you think we ought to do an A.W.? A.W.'s Alice in Wonderland? Andy Warhol's Alice in Wonderland? A.W. stands for a lot of things, I understand. It, uh, it would make a fantastic film. So I wanted somebody to write the script for it, in a modern sense. I think it would be the most marvelous movie in the world, if it could be done. Don't you think? Really, I don't think they've done one since they did a Walt Disney one — which isn’t really doing it. In a sense it is, but not in the way it really should be done. What's needed right now is a real scene. I mean not just cartoon characters, but the actual character of people because there's so many fantastic people that you might as well use the people.

Lewis Carroll is somebody who wore different hats. He was a clergyman, a mathematician, a teacher. He wrote serious books, and amazing children's books. He was a photographer. So like most people, he was many people in one skin. Creatively, he made a greater impact than almost any other Victorian, and yet we know next to nothing about him, we just fall back on the old cliché.

At that age, Alice had grasped the idea that some things in books were real, and others were not.

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.

These word games bothered and intrigued me. Appearing to be silly nonsense, on examination they were absolutely logical — yet they were still funny. The comedy doors opened wide, and Lewis Carroll’s clever fancies from the nineteenth century expanded my notion of what comedy could be. I began closing my show by announcing, “I’m not going home tonight; I’m going to Bananaland, a place where only two things are true, only two things: One, all chairs are green; and two, no chairs are green.” Not at Lewis Carroll’s level, but the line worked for my contemporaries, and I loved implying that the one thing I believed in was a contradiction. I also was enamored of the rhythmic poetry of e. e. cummings, and a tantalizing quote from one of his recorded lectures stayed in my head. When asked why he became a poet, he said, “Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.” The line, with its intriguing reference to comedy, was enigmatic, and it took me ten years to work out its meaning.

A Nursery Magician took
All little children by the hand:
And led them laughing through the book
Where Alice walks in Wonderland.

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,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where — ” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity.

Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine—in fact one shudders to imagine—a child of today reading and enjoying it.

Alice! A childish story take,
And with a gentile hand
Lay it where Childhood dreams are twined
In memory's mystic band,
Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers
Pluck'd in a far off land.

It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.