Even in play, logic reigns rigidly in Wonderland in a kind of spoof of the analytical philosophical logic popular at Oxford in Carroll’s day. One of the dangers in ending a child’s boredom is that the adult’s gesture will be, like a bad psychoanalytic session, too coercive, a kind of monstrous bestiary of loud-mouthed creatures and half-human authority figures—like Humpty Dumpty and a tyrannical Queen whose favorite line is “Off with her head!” What is Alice to do with other people’s wishes, other people’s logical desires? As Humpty Dumpty puts it, “The question is . . . which is to be master—that’s all” (p. 219).

Lewis Carroll was a teacher of symbolic logic at Oxford, and he loved to make mathematical knots for his pupils to wriggle out of. Carroll’s fondness for mathematical puzzles and classical logic admits of both the curious and trivial. He found logical problems and amusements in port prices, postal calculations, even lawn tennis. In 1883 he published a pamphlet, Lawn Tennis Tournaments, in which he proved, logically of course, that a player who lost in the first round might find that the finalist was an inferior player to herself. The lessons in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are clever impositions upon the logic, which is to say the reasonableness, of a child. Over the course of the two books, what might at first appear to the child as boring lessons in geography, anatomy, botany, astronomy, linguistics, geology (“What volcano?” [p. 161]), physics, and mathematics are transformed into the form most favored by oracles, kings, and children—riddles: Are flowers alive? Can a kitten play chess? Is saying what one means the same as meaning what one says? Is looking-glass milk good to drink? Both books commence with things that cannot be known, and both are thus about the curiosity and the desires provoked by unnamed somethings. In Alice, such somethings take the form of riddle-like creatures like Cheshire cats without bodies and rabbits with pocket watches. They may be something posing as nothing, or vice versa. In the book’s opening chapters, Alice falls literally into a riddle or void of insolubility: She cannot know how long her fall will be nor what is in the bottle on a small glass table, nor what will happen when she drinks from it.

Yet annoying and worrisome enticements are also—and Carroll seems to have understood this perfectly—incitations to desire, curiosity, and empathy—that is, open invitations not to be bored, not to remain the same as one was but to transform oneself, to relate to things and people outside oneself—and thus bring an end to one’s boredom. The book, like a camera obscura, mechanically and miraculously manufactures its exact mirror opposite. Out of Alice’s boredom arises a series of events defined by their whimsical changeableness, a series of frenetic and ridiculous lessons in bringing about the disappearance of the thing known as boredom itself. Nonsense, like boredom, turns out to be vast and chaotic, spanning inside and outside and defying notions of time and place, scale and sense, rightness and rudeness, rightness and leftness. Boredom seems a temporary non-event defined by a span of near-indeterminate waiting. Is Alice bored because she is desiring nonsensically or unreasonably?

In place of the dullness of an unread book and a large tract of time she doesn’t know how to fill, Alice confronts an officious White Rabbit who is worried about being late, a long or slow fall (it is impossible to tell which) down a hole lined with cupboards and empty jars of marmalade, a bottle that might or might not contain poison, and the frightful—that is, illogical—possibility of drowning in a pool of her own tears. Alice’s adventures are mathematically elaborate literary comfits or problem-sets, frustratingly opaque, more or less timeless events that are not quite events, with people who are not quite people, which is to say they are ridiculous obstacles to Alice’s desires.

What is the mirror opposite of boredom? It turns out to be a book, after all, one that mirrors and somehow inverts the most insoluble, and hence unforgettable, problems of the day: the extinction of species, the shifting, relative sizes of things, the loss of one’s identity and gravitas, and the speed of falling bodies. By chapter IV of Alice, “The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill,” Carroll appears to have worked wonders upon his heroine and pupil Alice. In one of her most remarkable early bouts of reasoning, Alice concludes that if she drinks from the bottle, “something interesting is sure to happen” (p. 44). Before the end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the good-natured Alice will have been distracted from her boredom and will have experienced a host of emotions, from bewilderment over bottles and the right vs. left sides of mushrooms, exasperation with the Mad Hatter’s table manners, anger over the rudeness of countless inhabitants of Wonderland, enchantment with miniature gardens, fear of an enormous puppy, and loneliness at having driven a mouse away. Like riddles, the creatures generate an odd mix of pity, curiosity, and exasperation in Alice. The opposite of boredom turns out to be unsettling and frustrating. Ending boredom may be more dangerous a pastime than it at first appears. In this way, Carroll suggests that Alice must be careful that her desires don’t turn into worries.