Nonsense and the Mind
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
C. G. Jung
This chapter uncovers deep connections between nonsense and the mind. A descriptive map of the complex mental causes and effects of nonsense will emerge. Consequently, reading this chapter will bring the hidden, unconscious world of nonsense fully into your conscious mind.
We will learn that nonsense is often a structural element of jokes and humor. We will see that talking nonsense sometimes indicates physical or mental illness. And we will understand some important commercial applications of nonsense, including advertising.
Nonsense is also an important uncharted dimension of the personality. For instance, individuals vary dramatically in their psychological responses to nonsense of various types. Studying the exercises students completed in my courses, I discerned fascinating underlying patterns in their responses. Such patterns convince me that there are distinctive, identifiable capacities of the mind that relate specifically to nonsense.
Carolyn Wells was an eminent literary scholar and expert on nonsense who edited The Nonsense Anthology (1905). In the introduction to that work, she said, “A sense of nonsense is as distinct a part of our mentality as a sense of humor.” My research convinces me that she was right, for students who completed the exercises thereby demonstrated six latent powers of their minds.
First, they were able to recognize certain examples of written or spoken language as unintelligible, meaningless, and nonsensical.
Second, they could identify nonsense by type.
Third, they could distinguish among different kinds of nonsense according to their distinctive structural characteristics.
Fourth, they could perceive, appreciate, and describe various aesthetic, emotional, and cognitive effects of nonsense.
Fifth, they could write original creative nonsense of practically any type they studied.
And sixth, they could identify nonsense they had not studied before and characterize their structures by using the principles of typology they had learned.
These six cognitive and creative capacities are an essential part of our mental makeup, and later on they will prove highly valuable, for we will see that they are critical for thinking logically about some important questions that have long eluded reason. Hence, it is useful to group together these six mental capacities related to unintelligible, meaningless language. Moreover, it is plausible to refer to them collectively as a sense of nonsense. And the sense of nonsense plays central roles in numerous psychological processes, or mental states.
In the meantime, it is simple to awaken the sense of nonsense. Each semester I directly witnessed and monitored positive developmental changes in my students’ sense of nonsense. They resumed a developmental process that was apparently stunted as they grew into adulthood. Many students commented that they benefited from taking the course. Even decades later, some have contacted me to say that what they learned about nonsense has helped them in their professional lives. For example, many students have told me that after learning my nonsense logic, it made other apparently unrelated subjects clearer to them.
My sense of nonsense has been an indispensable asset during my career as a medical doctor and psychiatrist, for it often helps me make sense of someone’s unique inner experience. Sometimes the nonsense that somebody talks becomes a notable aspect of that individual’s personality. The condition known as synesthesia is a case in point.
Synesthesia is the psychological trait of experiencing cross-sensory perceptions. That is, a perception in one sense, such as hearing, automatically and involuntarily produces an accompanying perceptive experience in another sense, such as vision. Hence, hearing a series of sounds will also give rise to an inner experience of seeing colors. Synesthetes (people with synesthesia) are therefore forced to talk nonsense to try and describe their unusual inner worlds. They say things like “Jill’s voice is light purple, but Jason’s voice is dark green.”
Colored hearing is one of the most common forms of synesthesia, but there are several dozen types. Thus, while some synesthetes report experiencing sounds as having colors, others report experiencing colors as having sounds. Dr. Richard Cytowic’s book Synesthesia (MIT Press, 2018) describes a boy who said things such as “That note is red.” The first time the boy saw a rainbow, he exclaimed, “A song, a song!”
Other synesthetes experience tastes as having colors. They talk nonsense like “Coffee tastes dark green, and milk tastes light orange.” Yet other synesthetes experience tastes as having shapes. They say nonsensical things like “Beet tastes square, and chicken tastes round.”
Synesthesia runs in families; some people experience synesthesia as children but eventually outgrow it. The nonsense that synesthetes talk reveals that their inner worlds are different than those of most other people.
Nonsense is a developmental marker of children’s learning of language.
When my son Carter was six months old, my wife read him a book of nonsense poetry for children. Carter’s big smile and peals of gleeful laughter were remarkable. To my wife and me, it certainly appeared that Carter appreciated the difference between meaningful language and nonsense. Perhaps independent investigators can confirm or disconfirm that infants can sometimes recognize nonsense.
Either way, though, nonsense enters into children’s lives at an early age. For instance, nonsense plays a role in the acquisition of language. Children three to six years of age make up nonsense words for fun as an expression of humor and their creative spirit.
The pleasure children take in making up meaningless words indicates that they have attained a certain level of understanding of language, for they must possess a large vocabulary of meaningful words to appreciate their difference from meaningless nonsense words. Furthermore, the nonsense words that children invent reflect the phonetic patterns of words in their own language. English-speaking children’s meaningless invented words are near-English nonsense, for example.
Preschoolers talk various forms of numerative nonsense as part of the process of learning numbers. For example, I once saw two kindergartners fighting over a swing at a playground. One yelled, “I’m telling you for the fifty-eleventh time, get off my swing!” Many observant parents can recount similar incidents.
When my son Avery was three years old, he looked at my watch and asked, “Is it timey-till?” When I said, “Well, there is no such time as ‘timey-till,’” he asked again, louder, and only stopped when I said yes.
When he was six years old, my son Samuel invented his own nonsensical system of counting. He felt certain that there had to be something before zero, so, first, he would fix his gaze ahead intently for a second or two. Then he would exclaim, “Wait!” And then, “Nothing!” And only then would he say, “Zero!”
My daughter, Carol Ann, also created funny numerative nonsense. When she was five and a half years old, she held a metal tape measure and placed the tip of it near the top of my head. She looked at the tape measure and said, “You are forty-eight pounds tall.”
Before she learned to draw the letters of the alphabet, Carol Ann went through a phase of mock writing. Beginning when she was about nine or ten months old, she enjoyed sitting with me as I wrote in my notebooks. When she was three years and two months old, she took the pen herself. She said she was writing as she drew pointed squiggles that exactly resembled the mock writing in cartoons. As she drew, she recited a seemingly random series of letters: “C, E, A, B, T.”
When my grandson, Ray, was four years old, he learned the concept of opposites by playing a game of question and answer with his parents. Ray and his parents would ask each other, for example, “What is the opposite of up?” or “What is the opposite of hot?” and “What is the opposite of dark?” Once, when his turn came, Ray asked, “What is the opposite of car?”
Ray’s question is an instance of categorical nonsense, another type that we examined earlier. A sentence of categorical nonsense is grammatically correct and all the words are meaningful. However, the concepts in the sentence do not fit together. Hence, children often talk nonsense inadvertently when they are trying to learn a new concept.
These and many other instances show that children create nonsense as they are learning language. A nonsense phrase seems to be a part of the process of learning numbers or how to write or a new concept. Nevertheless, occasional individuals worry that it might be dangerous to read the works of Lewis Carroll and Dr. Seuss to children. They are concerned that nonsense writings could interfere with children’s ability to distinguish fact from fantasy.
In reality, however, it seems the very opposite is true. The Russian child psychologist Kornei Chukovsky observed that nonsense actually exerts a beneficial influence on children’s sense of reality. He wrote:
Nonsense…not only does not interfere with the child’s orientation to the world that surrounds him, but, on the contrary, strengthens in his mind a sense of the real; and that it is precisely in order to further the education of children in reality that such nonsense verse should be offered to them…One can cite any number of such [verses] which testify to the inexhaustible need of every healthy child of every era and of every nation to introduce nonsense into his small but ordered world, with which he has only recently become acquainted. Hardly has the child comprehended with certainty which objects go together and which do not, when he begins to listen happily to verses of absurdity.45
Nonsense is often humorous: “I am nude under my clothes.” The words certainly command attention, and they create a vivid image in the mind, yet the intellect strives in vain to put them together as a meaningful sentence. In other words, the sentence is unintelligible, and that is part of what makes it funny. Anyone who studies the subject soon realizes that there is a strong connection between nonsense and humorous laughter.
Nonsense promotes social bonding. A few nonsensical playground rhymes like the one below have been transmitted virtually unchanged for well over a century. They are a form of oral literature, passed along only by word of mouth from child to child.
One bright day in the middle of the night
Two dead boys got up to fight
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A blind man came to see the fray.
A dumb man came to shout “hooray!”
A deaf policeman heard the noise
And came and killed those two dead boys.
Children chant those playground rhymes together, often while tossing a ball around among themselves in a circle. This way of integrating nonsense chanting with physical activity can forge enduring social bonds. Many adults can still recite these nonsense rhymes and have fond childhood memories of chanting them with their friends.
My friend Madeleine Diemer, a psychotherapist, also has warm childhood memories of reciting nonsense with other people to cement a bond with them. Madeline would recite nonsense with her family members. They said these words together each night when they finished eating dinner: “I’ve had an excellent sufficiency, and more would be prodotony to my apathetic quantity, which is quite quadilified.” Since then I have learned of several instances of this among my friends and acquaintances.
Hence, I surmise that the practice of talking nonsense together as a family after dinner must be a more common ritual than I would have imagined. Furthermore, the people who shared these memories with me obviously looked back on their experiences with nostalgic tenderness. Thinking about the nonsense they would recite seemed to stir up their feelings about their family members.
Apparently, group recitations of nonsense are sometimes an effective means of creating social bonds among people. How this works is not clear, but it is an interesting effect and bears further investigation. Later we will discover more about the use of nonsense to unify people and get them to cooperate with each other.
Nonsense heard from others sometimes prompts people to talk nonsense involuntarily in response. When my children were only three or four years old, they would talk nonsense back to me when I talked nonsense to them. This and other observations lead me to believe that nonsense breeds nonsense. That is, talking nonsense seems to predispose people to respond with nonsense. This happens automatically, without any conscious intention on their part. I could recount about a dozen cases of this effect, of which the following two cases are representative.
I once read this sentence to my assistant:
The slozy begoners floofed in tarkly from below in their cluddering, plaggering flootiedopters.
The sentence astonished and energized her. She became somewhat agitated and spoke rapidly. She launched into an excited attempt to explain away the sentence. It seemed particularly unsettling to her that flootiedopters would floof in from below. Her explanation quickly ran aground and trailed off into incoherent, unintelligible nonsense.
In another example, my brother and I once stayed up talking most of the night. In the early morning hours, I read him Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and Algernon C. Swinburne’s “Nephelidia.” The nonsense had an astonishing, delayed effect on him. Over the next few days, nonsense would insert itself, uninvited, into his conversations. He said, “For a couple of days afterwards, nonsense was at the front of my mind. Something that wasn’t even a real word would enter my mind and fly out of my mouth before I knew what was happening. It was as though I had no control over what I said. Nonsense words would come out in my dreams, too.”
What is it about nonsense that seems to inspire nonsense in others? What might we learn about human psychology by investigating this “rebound effect” more carefully and looking at the hidden, powerful qualities of unintelligible speech?
Nonsense sometimes emerges when the mind is attempting to escape from a severe stressor. Severe overwhelming stress makes people talk incoherent nonsense. G. K. Chesterton once said it was the “idea of escape” that is “the idea that lies at the back of all nonsense.” Soldiers rescued from horrendous combat situations sometimes could only talk in garbled nonsense afterward. Although they survived uninjured, the soldiers had faced imminent death. The psychological trauma had left them unable to put words together into intelligible sentences.
I observed this phenomenon a few times myself when working as a physician in emergency rooms. Sometimes survivors of horrific accidents would talk incoherent nonsense after they had been brought in from the scene. Though they had not been hurt in the accident, overwhelming stress disrupted their mental processes that organized meaningful speech.
On April 16, 2007, a disturbed gunman shot and killed 32 students and professors at Virginia Tech University. The killer trapped thirty of his victims in a campus building and shot them in the classrooms at point-blank range. Other students survived by jumping to safety from windows on the second floor. One student who escaped telephoned his mother immediately afterwards to assure her that he was safe. She reported that initially he was incoherent when he spoke to her. At first, she said, “I couldn’t understand him. It was like gibberish.”46
Nonsense is inseparably connected with sleeping and dreaming. Hypnagogia is a transitional state of consciousness people experience as they drift from wakefulness to sleep. Many people perceive surrealistic, iridescently colorful mental imagery during the hypnagogic phase of consciousness. Many also experience strange nonsense words and phrases running through their minds.
I have written down my own hypnagogic nonsense since graduate school. I have heard disconnected nonsense phrases such as “fine of apple bijani,” “two nose of harsh cumple,” “obal summus,” and “drish the awesome closerfose.” Experts on hypnagogic phenomena recognize this kind of nonsense as a common manifestation of the process of going to sleep.
In the superb book Hypnagogia, Andreas Mavromatis quotes dozens of similar examples of hypnagogic nonsense from various sources, including:
Lacertina Wain
They are exposed to verbally intellection.
He is as good as cake double.
A leading clerk is a great thing in my profession, as well as a Sabine footertootro.
To the sidewalk with Tell too.
Conceit is not often being named a phantabilit.
A Burul house Schillinger to cook plate.
Amaranda es tifiercia.
Knows how tampala sounds.
Suddenly waking up with a “brilliant” idea is another common hypnagogic experience. People sometimes write down nighttime revelations, then go back to sleep, confident that their discovery will revolutionize the world. Occasionally, these ideas do pan out. More often, though, the sleepers are disappointed the next morning, for they realize that what they wrote during the night is nonsense. Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), who wrote Gulliver’s Travels, experienced this odd phenomenon. He recorded the following nonsense poem he heard while asleep: “I walk before no man, a hawk in his fist; Nor am I brilliant, whenever I list.”47
Similarly, some people talk nonsense when they talk in their sleep. I myself have heard several people talk nonsense in their sleep. Other people have told me the same thing about their sleeping children or spouses who talk nonsense in the night.
Sometimes we are forced to talk nonsense in order to verbalize bizarre, outlandish dreams. As an undergraduate student of philosophy, I once dreamed I was holding arguments in my palms. I seemed to be putting interconnected, silvery segments together in my hands when I was reasoning to prove a point. I also had a dream in which two of my relatives and one of my friends were fused incomprehensibly together into a single dream personage. Of course, some dreams are quite literal and can be captured in straightforward, prosaic language. Often enough, though, nonsense stories are the only available means of putting strange dreams into words.
Nonsense can be a sign of medical or psychiatric disorders. People sometimes talk nonsense when they suffer from psychosis or physical ailments that affect the mind. “Word salad” is a form of nonsensical speech found in schizophrenia. Schizophrenics mix made-up, meaningless neologisms with actual words, with the mixture lacking overall sense. I had a patient with paranoid schizophrenia who made up blatantly obscene nonsense words. His long, rambling epistles were addressed to no one in particular, and they were full of meaningless words like “thuckabussy,” “puckcucky,” and “fugbucker.”
The self-contradictory utterance “I am dead” is a hallmark of the delusional disorder known as the Cotard syndrome. These patients convince themselves that they are dead, and they cannot be swayed by rational arguments to the contrary. Severe psychotic depression causes this delusional belief that one is dead.
Intoxication with various psychoactive substances also causes people to talk nonsense. For example, the anesthetic nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, has this effect. American psychologist William James studied the effects of nitrous oxide by inhaling it himself. He carefully wrote down what he thought at the time were profound mystical revelations. Here is his account of the phenomenon:
I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality.48
What’s mistake but a kind of take?
What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea?
Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment.
Everything can become the subject of criticism—how criticise without something to criticise?
Agreement—disagreement!!
Emotion—motion!!!49
By God, how that hurts! By God, how it doesn’t hurt! Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense.
Thought deeper than speech—!
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL! Oh my God, oh God, oh God!50
Mercury poisoning causes irritability, mood swings, and, sometimes, meaningless, rambling speech. In the nineteenth century, mercury was the main ingredient of a fashionable pharmaceutical remedy for depression known as blue mass. Abraham Lincoln took the popular antidepressant and apparently became intoxicated with mercury.
Henry Clay Whitney was an attorney who often traveled a circuit with his friend, the future president. He wrote that he awoke one morning to find Mr. Lincoln sitting up in bed and “talking the wildest and most incoherent nonsense to himself.”51 Fortunately, Mr. Lincoln stopped taking blue mass before he became president because he found it made him “cross.”
Even those who by profession are communicators may have moments where lucidity suddenly lapses. As reported in the March 2015 issue of New Scientist, Serene Branson, a Los Angeles broadcaster reporting from the Grammy Awards, struggled visibly to speak meaningfully as her lips formed the words, “Well a very, very heavy ah heavy duit burtation tonight. We had a very deres dereson. But let’s go ahead tarish dereson tasen losh lobitt behind dupet.” Branson later described the moments as terrifying, as she could not put together an intelligible sentence. Later, it was determined that a migraine headache was responsible for her disrupted speech. The same year, a Madison, Wisconsin, television anchor, Sarah Carlson, had a small seizure during a broadcast, leaving a confused and disoriented audience to try to make sense of her unintelligible words.
Athletes of all kinds, particularly boxers and football players, also have had instances in which their language has become unintelligible for medical reasons. In many cases the effects are short-lived, but all who witness the delirious speech realize something beyond the normal has occurred, and it leaves a powerful impression.
Nonsense can make people doubt their senses or think that they are going crazy. Nonsense can confuse people. For instance, double-talk is a variety of near-English nonsense that mentalists and magicians use for entertaining their audiences. They talk double-talk to cloud people’s minds and make them laugh.
Double-talk is created by a simple formula: Begin sentences with phrases like, “Do you know—?” or “Will you please tell me—?” or “Do you have any idea where—?” to get listeners’ attention. Their wheels start turning as they prepare to come up with an answer. Then toss in a liberal quantity of made-up, meaningless near-English nonsense words. The process results in double-talk such as, “Would you please tell me where I can find some spanagloap for the tarkerblay?”
As listeners, we bring multiple meanings and associations to the act of listening, assuming that in every act of communication, the speaker’s intent is to communicate meaningfully. In the case of double-talk, the listener’s expectations are not met, and this can lead to people questioning both their senses and sanity.
Nonsense can powerfully attract and hold people’s attention. Nonsense often captures and holds attention more effectively than humdrum, prosaic language that is perfectly meaningful and intelligible. For example, advertising is all about getting attention. That is the reason why nonsense shows up frequently in ads. A television ad for KPMG, a corporate finance firm, was built around categorical nonsense. The ad incomprehensibly mixed the phraseology of motherly admonitions with the terminology of international finance. In the ad, cranky mother figures offered meaningless advice like, “Don’t go out with wet hair. You might catch a case of involuntary international corporate rightsizing.” Another cranky mother insisted, “Always construct a mass utilization model before crossing the street.”
Television cable companies compete with operators of television communications satellites. Satellites formerly did not transmit local television news programs, and cable operators saw this as a selling point for their companies. One cable company drove the point home with an ad featuring nonsense in the form of an alien mock language. In the ad, an extraterrestrial sat behind a news desk in a television studio on a distant planet. He delivered the news by chirping away in a nonsense mock language. The ad implied, “If you want to watch the local news, get cable.”
The Partnership for a Drug-Free America urges parents to learn about drug abuse to protect their children. The organization spread their message with a television ad that featured a meaningless string of words. In the ad, a concerned mother tries to discuss the drug problem with her teenage daughter, saying, “Hypnosis completely tailwind sowing elephants plant before cartoon paper cups. So numbers renovate. Afterwards lightly fish scale doorbell.” Her teenage daughter’s facial expression was one of dazed incomprehension, and that drove home the ad’s point: namely, get educated on the drug problem before you talk to your children about it. Otherwise, what you say may sound like nonsense to them.
Nonsense irresistibly compels some people to search for a supposed hidden meaning. Nonsense drives some people to try to interpret it out of existence. That is, its meaningless, unintelligible quality is beckoning. Nonsense makes us feel that although we cannot discern a meaning, one is somehow just out of reach. We seem to sense a meaning just around the corner or over the horizon. We feel that if we only put in more effort, we may discover this tantalizing meaning, so we turn nonsense over and over in our minds. We try hard to find a position in which the nonsense will snap into place and make sense. Some people go on and on, obsessively working on nonsense, trying to shear as much of the “non” away from it as they can.
These people become fixated on the idea that nonsense is a code, something like pig Latin. If only one could discover its secret formula, nonsense would reveal a hidden message.
The centuries-old Voynich manuscript is a case in point. This bizarre document is kept in the rare books department of the library of Yale University. The two-hundred-plus pages of the manuscript are written in an unintelligible alphabet of twenty-two nonsense letters. The writing resembles no known alphabet.
The margins of the pages are adorned with sketches that resemble those found in medieval illuminated manuscripts. The drawings depict nude women, animals and plants of no known species, and an incomprehensible plumbing system. One commentator said that the “manuscript has the eerie quality of a perfectly sensible book from an alternate universe.”
A long parade of cryptographers tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript by assuming that it is in code. The problem is that each cryptographer’s solution diverges wildly from all the rest, for the Voynich manuscript is an ingenious hoax and a masterpiece of mock language. Sadly, however, the identity of the clever nonsense writer who dreamed it up is lost in the mists of time.
This is a good place to reflect and remember what nonsense is; namely, it is meaningless, unintelligible language. From the viewpoint of an author trying to write good nonsense poems or stories, accidentally meaning something is a failure of art. Nonsense writers have been bemused by determined enthusiasts who tried to interpret their literary nonsense out of existence by uncovering a concealed meaning in it.
Lewis Carroll was perplexed and amused by his many interpreters. He responded to those who asked him to reveal the supposed hidden meaning of his nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark.” He wrote:
I was walking on a hill-side, alone, one bright summer day, when suddenly there came into my head one line of verse—one solitary line—‘For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.’ I knew not what it meant, then: I know not what it means, now: but I wrote it down: and, some time afterwards, the rest of the stanza occurred to me, that being its last line: and so by degrees, at odd moments during the next year or two, the rest of the poem pieced itself together, that being its last stanza. And since then, periodically, I have received courteous letters from strangers, begging to know whether ‘the Hunting of the Snark’ is an allegory, or contains some hidden moral, or is a political satire: and for all such questions I have but one answer, “I don’t know!”52
We need to reemphasize that nonsense is not a coded message, for a coded message looks like meaningless, unintelligible nonsense, to be sure. Nevertheless, knowing the code used enables someone to decipher the message and understand its hidden meaning.
Transmitting meaningful, secret messages securely is the purpose of encryption. If the message were meaningless, there would be no need to conceal the meaning. However, by definition, nonsense is meaningless. Therefore, equating nonsense with coded messages destroys the meaning of the word “code” and the meaning of the word “nonsense.”
Senders sometimes insert nonsense words into a secret message before encoding it. The technique deceives code-breakers because they look for the meaning in a coded message, not for the nonsense in it. In other words, nonsense planted deliberately in coded messages can make the work of deciphering them harder.
Nonsense stimulates a flow of odd mental imagery, half-formed ideas, and fragmentary chains of thought. Nonsense is language that is meaningless and unintelligible by definition, yet something strange and hard to define emerges in the mind of someone who reads nonsense or listens to it being read or spoken aloud. Nonsense can register in the mind as a peculiar, surreal state of consciousness.
Reflecting on a nonsense poem that she heard, Alice said, “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t know exactly what they are!”53
My students described their introspective experiences of reading or hearing nonsense in similar terms. According to their descriptions, nonsense induces a stream of incoherent, dreamlike ideation. Nonsense evoked nebulous mentation that they found hard to describe. Nonsense called up garbled images or vague thoughts in their minds.
This off state of free-floating consciousness is the flip side of what happens in the hypnagogic state, dreams, psychosis, and delirium. Those conditions are alternate states of consciousness during which people talk nonsense, and apparently the same process works in the opposite direction. Talking nonsense to people makes them experience a curious, hard-to-describe alternate state of consciousness. In sum, nonsense is an alternate state of language that can induce an alternate state of consciousness.
Does nonsense of each different type induce a corresponding, different alternate state of consciousness? Could a typology of nonsense provide a vocabulary for talking more intelligibly and precisely about alternate states of consciousness? Might some particular type or combination of types of nonsense induce an alternate state of consciousness that would somehow be superior to ordinary consciousness? In other words, could nonsense be a doorway to a higher sense? The universal structural formula that abides in every type of nonsense may help us understand the language of transcendent consciousness.
45. Kornei Chukovsky, From Two to Five (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1971), translated and edited by Miriam Morton.
46. New York Times, April 17, 2007, A24.
47. Damrosch, Jonathan Swift, 221.
48. James, The Will to Believe, 295.
49. Ibid., 296.
50. James, The Will to Believe, 297.
51. Richardson, Richardson’s Defense of the South, 471.
52. Carroll, “Alice on the Stage,” 181.
53. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 34.