The Child As Philosophy in Motion

 

Anthony Lane reviews Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland.  Neither Douglas-Fairhurst nor Lane unearth any secrets about Wonderland, but Lane offers a wonderfully concise tutorial on Lewis Carroll and the Alice books.

Conversations about what is real, what is possible, and how rubbery the rules that govern such distinctions turn out to be abound in the tales of Alice. Yet they are sold as children’s books, and rightly so. A philosopher will ask how the identity of the self can be preserved amid the ceaseless flux of experience, but a child—especially a child who is growing so fast that she suddenly fills an entire room—will ask more urgently, as Alice does, “Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different.” Children, viewed from one angle, are philosophy in motion.

And my latest favorite passage from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

`I see nobody on the road,’ said Alice.

`I only wish I had such eyes,’ the King remarked in a fretful tone. `To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!’

 

 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/0…