The Phantom Tollbooth Reread: Chapter 16
Chapter 16: A Very Dirty Bird
Milo climbs the stairs to infinity, but eventually collapses. As he begins talking to himself, half of a small child starts talking to him. Okay, .58 of a child. The child says that they are the average family, with a mother, father, and 2.58 children. He is the .58. He also says that infinity is a dreadfully poor place where no one can make ends meet.
They discuss averages. Milo is confused by some of the examples given to him, such as
QuoteIf one rat were cornered by nine cats, then, on average, each cat would be 10 percent* rat and the rat would be 90 percent cat.
The boy offers Milo some more advice, namely that even though Milo can never reach Infinity, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth looking for. Milo decides to turn around. A few minutes later he is back with Tock, the Humbug, and the Mathemagician. More great advice:
QuoteYou’ll find, that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort
They have some conversation, including a silly letter that Mathemagician sent to Azaz, which is made up only of numbers. Eventually, Milo out logics Mathemagician and gets him to agree to the rescue of the Princesses Rhyme and Reason.
The Mathemagician transports them to the edge of Digitopolis by carrying the three (ha!) and the (goddamn it) Dodecahedron has Milo’s gifts. He hands over the gifts of sight, sounds, and words. Mathemagician gives Milo a gift as well, a “magic staff” which appears to me to just be a pencil, but whatever, I’ll go with it.
The trio takes off into the Mountains of Ignorance.
They climb and it gets darker, but not darkness from night. It’s a “mixture of lurking shadows and evil intentions which oozed from the slimy moss-covered cliffs and blotted out the light”
Milo wonders if they should wait until morning, and a voice replies that “They’ll be mourning for you soon enough.”
The voice belongs to a filthy bird who “looked more like a dirty floor mop” Milo says something in reply about looking for place to spend the night, the bird makes another gosh-darn pun, and I slam my book shut. (Just Kidding!)
The puns go on for a bit, finally Tock (the dog of reason) asks the bird if he has to be like that. And the bird answers in the affirmative. He is the Everpresent Wordsnatcher, and he is from a far away land called Context. He is not a demon, only a nuisance, and he flies off.
The next character we come across is a well dressed, friendly man with no face. He asks the trio for help with some small tasks, and they cheerfully agree. He asks them to move a mound of sand with some tweezers, move a well with an eyedropper, and crave a hole in a cliff with a needle. For some reason, the trio works on this for hours before the chapter ends.
*For some reason, the text has percent written as per cent.
Thoughts:
We are finally in the Mountains of Ignorance! Milo will be faced with a series of demons and then will go to the Castle in the Air and meet the princesses! There is a lot of interesting stuff coming up, and I think this chapter and the one before it have some of the best quotes about Milo and learning things. But alas, I can't just copy and paste the entire chapter into a blog post, so I just have to "recap" it.
The Everpresent Wordsnatcher says something about knowing the Humbug. That makes sense, because the Humbug uses a lot of words to say very little and represents people who do the same. Tock is still the most reasonable character here, being a pretty good opposite of the Humbug. Milo is still learning. But he's learned a lot and that is reflected in his conversations with the "Mathemagician."
LINKS:
- Chapters 1 & 2
- Chapters 3 & 4
- Chapters 5 & 6
- Chapters 7 & 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapters 14 & 15
- 1
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