"Фредерик Браун. Night of the Jabberwock (англ) " - читать интересную книгу автора

Do you know what he had published before that?"
I shook my head.
"Two books. He wrote and published A Syllabus of Plane Geometry in
eighteen sixty and in the year after that his Formulae of Plane
Trigonometry. Have you read either of them?"
I had to shake my head again. I said, "Mathematics isn't my forte. I've
read only his non-technical books."
He smiled. "There aren't any. You simply failed to recognize the
mathematics embodied in the Alice books and in his poetry. You do know, I'm
sure, that many of his poems are acrostics."
"Of course."
"All of them are acrostics, but in a much more subtle manner. However,
I can see why you failed to find the clues if you haven't read his treatises
on mathematics. You wouldn't have read his Elementary Treatise on
Determinants, I suppose. But how about his Curiosa Mathematica?"
I hated to disappoint him again, but I had to.
He frowned at me. "That at least you should have read. It's not
technical at all, and most of the clues to the fantasies are contained in
it. There are further and final references to them in his Symbolic Logic,
published in eighteen ninety-six, just two years before his death, but they
are less direct."
I said, "Now, wait a minute. If I understand you correctly your thesis
is that Lewis Carroll leaving aside any question of who or what he really
was worked out through mathematics and expressed in fantasy the fact that
what?"
"That there is another plane of existence besides the one we are now
living in. That we can have and do sometimes have access to it."
"But what kind of a plane? A through-the-looking-glass plane of
fantasy, a dream plane?"
"Exactly, Doctor. A dream plane. That isn't strictly accurate, but it's
about as nearly as I can explain it to you just yet." He leaned forward.
"Consider dreams. Aren't they the almost perfect parallel of the Alice
adventures? The wool-and-water sequence, for instance, where everything
Alice looks at changes into something else. Remember in the shop, with the
old sheep knitting, how Alice looked hard to see what was on the shelves,
but the shelf she looked at was always empty although the others about it
were always full of something, and she never found out what?"
I nodded slowly. I said, "Her comment was, 'Things flow about so here.'
And then the sheep asked if Alice could row and handed her a pair of
knitting needles and the needles turned into oars in her hands and she was
in a boat, with the sheep still knitting."
"Exactly, Doctor. A perfect dream sequence. And consider that
Jabberwocky which is probably the best thing in the second Alice book is
in the very language of dreams. It's full of words like trumious, manxome,
tulgey, words that give you a perfect picture in context but you can't put
your finger on what the context is. In a dream you fully understand such
meanings, but you forget them when you awaken."
Between "manxome" and "tulgey" he'd downed his latest drink. I didn't
pour another this time; I was beginning to wonder how long the bottle or we
would last. But he showed no effect whatsoever from the drinks he'd been