Instead of feeling, Alice tends to worry, just like the White Rabbit who is a parody of an adult male who worries too much. Worries are a form of policing one’s desires, often before they become desires. Yet worries are not easy to see for what they are. Like a pun, the White Rabbit keeps disappearing. Worries are almost feelings. Like minor disturbances, they disappear and begin again and disappear and begin again. They are the feelings we don’t want to be having—but are.

From a Darwinian perspective, many creatures of Wonderland are both inedible and extremely rare. Yet they exist. They constitute a bestiary of related things, though their family lineages are murky. They inhabit the same world and dine at the same table, yet they are antithetical to community. They do not share their feelings, and this makes them likely to be forgotten. For Carroll, like most nineteenth-century probability experts, eccentricity is another word for deviance, opposed to the normal, and bad for reproduction. The identical twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum threaten to become the victims of a fratricide. Not surprisingly, when Alice sees them she wonders if they are alive. The same could be said of Wonderland and the world beyond the looking glass, which, like childhood and the life of a gnat, verge on expiration. Unlike a bored child, the White Rabbit is in a very big hurry, in a race with the watch he carries on his person. In a gesture of compassionate conservation, Carroll terminates Through the Looking-Glass with a manual of extinction, his unending desire couched as a memorial poem for Alice herself: “Long has paled that sunny sky: / Echos fade and memories die: / Autumn frosts have slain July” (p. 272).

Near the end of the books, Alice angrily calls quits to the pack of cards and pulls the tablecloth out from under the diners’ meal. Indeterminism creates a world where there is no end to worrying about what Alice was unable to consume, and the most non-consumable thing about ourselves is our own passions. What is to be done with them? Desire resembles a game not with subjects who reciprocate our feelings but with losers and winners. Both books end violently, with the upsetting of a table and of a pack of cards, acts that suggest the end of an unsuccessful game and the figurative death of Alice’s desires. So the final book ends—with a poem that signals Carroll’s farewell.

PROBABLE ENDINGS AND IMPROBABLE BEGINNINGS

“And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”

“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.

“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”

“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!” (p. 197)

Both Alice books begin with dullness, pass through fantasy and end with waking (back to dullness). Boredom is a part of the indeterminate stuff of this world, a kind of question that cannot be answered by our desires. The various animal and human-like creatures in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are in the end difficult to locate in any real place. Yet Carroll fastidiously brackets each book to suggest that the vagaries of dreaming and nonsense occur within the boundaries of a book and the head of a sleeping child. Alice wakes to a world of dull reasonableness, which is to say that chance has yet to become the chief quality of the world out there, what the philosopher Ian Hacking terms “objective chance.” Yet for the child, curiosity, like love, is defined by boundlessness. Dullness without, chaos and wonder within—or is it the other way around?

Alice and Looking-Glass are nineteenth-century works; they regard disorder and chaos as problems to be tucked away in regressive moments of dreaming and remembering.