Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

On a July afternoon, rowing three little girls up the river, an Oxford mathematician began making up a story to pass the time, and one of them, Alice Liddell, begged him to write it down. What he gave her was a country where logic has not been abandoned but obeyed too well: a Queen who hands down the sentence before the verdict, a trial whose evidence arrives after the judgment, a croquet match played with live flamingos and hedgehogs that wander off mid-stroke. Charles Dodgson could invert reason precisely because he taught it, and the deep joke of Wonderland is that its madness is consistent. Alice keeps her manners and her common sense and finds neither is any defence against a world where words mean whatever the speaker needs them to and a single bite of mushroom rewrites who you are. The Caterpillar's question is not idle. Who are you, when nothing will hold still long enough to tell you?