The Mountains of Instead

  A SYNDROME OF MINE, AND MAYBE YOURS A critical (best sense) reader of my work once wrote an entire essay about allusions to and quotes from Lewis Carroll’s  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books in a novel of mine called  Little, Big —a very  Alice  sort of title in the first place. Some of the quotes and allusions, while certainly there, were unconscious; the turns of phrase and paradoxes and names in those books are so ingrained in me that they simply form part of my vocabulary. I first heard them read aloud: my older sister read them to me when I was about eight years old. I don’t remember my reaction to  Alice in Wonderland —except for absorbing it wholly—because for certain books read or heard at certain moments in childhood, there is no first reading: such books enter the mind and soul as though they had always been there. I do remember my reaction to  Through the Looking Glass : I found it unsettlingly weird, dark, dreamlike (it is in fact the greatest dream-book ever written

A NOTE ON ALCHEMY   From its formulation in Hellenistic times through the enormous expansion it underwent in the late Renaissance, alchemy was always a science : that is, a method of investigating the properties of nature, based on a system of assumptions about what nature is.   The alchemical method was, cheifly, transformation: the attempt to transform one kind of thing into another. Successful transformation would prove to the alchemist that he did, in fact, understand the nature of the things he transformed--for instance, lead transformed into gold. Among the assumptions of alchemy--as of all ancient science--was the assumption that human moral and spiritual distinctions extended into the world of physical processes: that the stars, the metals, the acids the alchemist worked with had moral qualities, goodness and badness, kindness and unkindness; and that matter, like the human soul, had aspirations to rise from "base" to "noble". Another working hypothe