Magic Boxes
"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas– only I don't exactly know what they are!…. Let's have a look at the garden first!"
— A passage from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. The "garden" part– but not the "ideas" part– was quoted by Jacques Derrida in Dissemination in the epigraph to Chapter 7, "The Time before First."
Commentary
on the passage:
Part I "The Magic Box," shown on Turner Classic Movies earlier tonight
Part II: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," a classic science fiction story:
"… he lifted a square, transparent crystal block, small enough to cup in his palm– much too small to contain the maze of apparatus within it. In a moment Scott had solved that problem. The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass, vastly enlarging the things inside the block. Strange things they were, too. Miniature people, for example– They moved. Like clockwork automatons, though much more smoothly. It was rather like watching a play."
Part III: A Crystal Block —
Image of pencils is by
Diane Robertson Design.
Related material:
"A Four-Color Theorem."
Part IV:
