This month WRLB/Bookclub’s selection is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. This book, I’m sure you’ll remember, pops up on LOST quite a bit. However, a specific EDITION of this book is associated with Jack/Christian/David [in "Something Nice Back Home" and "Lighthouse"].
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition Lewis Carroll, Introduction and Notes by Martin Gardner.
It’s that “NOTES by Martin Gardner” part that sent your old pal Amy to the bookstore. The NOTES are the most valuable clue here.
Try THIS on for size:
From “Chapter VI: Pig and Pepper” [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, pp. 65-66]
Alice, having released a baby-turned-into-a-pig into the forest, comes upon “the Cheshire-Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.”
The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.
“Cheshire-Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on. “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.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. “What sort of people live here?”
“In that direction,” the Cat said, waiving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”
[Notice that the Hatter and the Hare "live" in opposite directions -- they are POLARIZED. Get it? We learn in the next chapter that they actually ARE together. They are stuck at the tea table (with a sleepy dormouse) because Time is angry with the Hatter. Um, I guess the Hatter ticked him off. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!].
“But I don’t want to go among mad people, ” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” ["I'm real. You're real."]
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be, “said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Alice didn’t think that proved it at all: however, she went on: “And how do you know that you’re mad?”
“To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?”
“I suppose so,” said Alice.
“Well, then, “the Cat went on, “you see a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.”
“I call it purring, not growling,” said Alice.
“Call it what you like,” said the Cat.
The Cat defines himself as “mad” based on hinky logic: As a cat is the opposite of a dog, and since, as Alice admits, “a dog is not mad,” then the Cat, as POLAR OPPOSITE, MUST be mad by definition. Alice points out that the Cat doesn’t compare to a dog — the criteria don’t match. The Cat basically says, well, that’s your perspective, isn’t it?
Interesting to note that there’s only ONE dog in this entire story: a puppy Alice encounters early on. The puppy is the only animal that doesn’t speak. It still acts like an animal.
Know why the Hatter was “mad?” Hatters used mercury to set the brims on hats. Mercury poisoning made the sufferer act “crazy.” Gardner mentions this in his notes, but I’d already heard this interesting little tidbit on TV. Walter, the crazy scientist, tells his son about mercury and the hatters on episode 3.03, “Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sleep?” On FRINGE.
Further notes on the same scene [pp. 67-68]:
Compare the Cheshire Cat’s remarks with the following entry of February 9, 1856, in Carroll’s diary [That would be LEWIS CARROLL. The guy who WROTE the Alice books.]
Query: when we are dreaming and, as often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane? May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: “Sleep hath its own world,” and it is often as lifelike as the other.
[Truck on over to Rewatching LOST: Amy, "Matthew Fox" and The Island to find out more about PERCEPTION, REALITY and MEMORY.]
Finally, Gardner throws in a little Greek philosophy, just for kicks.
In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates and Theaetetus discuss this topic as follows:
- Theaetetus: I certainly cannot undertake to argue that madmen or dreamers think truly, when they imagine, some of them that they are gods, and others that they can fly, and are flying in their sleep.
- Socrates: Do you see another question which can be raised about these phenomena, notably about dreaming and waking?
- Theaetetus: What question?
- Socrates: A question which I think that you must often have heard persons ask: how can you determine whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?
- Theaetetus: Indeed, Socrates, I do not know how to prove the one any more than the other, for in both cases the facts precisely correspond; and there is no difficulty in supposing that during all this discussion we have been talking to one another in a dream; and when in a dream we seem to be narrating dreams, the resemblance of the two states is quite astonishing.
- Socrates: You see, then, that a doubt about the reality of sense is easily raised, since there may even be a doubt whether we are awake or in a dream. And as our time is equally divided between sleeping and waking, in either sphere of existence the soul contends that the thoughts which are present to our minds at the same time are true; and during one half of our lives we affirm the truth of the one, and, during the other half, of the other; and are equally confident of both.
- Theaetetus: Most true.
- Socrates: And may not the same be said of madness and the other disorders? The difference is only that the times are not equal.
Not equal as in UNBALANCED?
Whoa.
Happy LOST Reading!
