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The Phantom Tollbooth Reread: Chapters 17 & 18


Maggie Mae

7,263 views

Chapter 17: Unwelcoming Committee

After what seemed like days, the trio of reluctant heroes have barely made any progress on their projects. Milo notices that he doesn’t feel tired or hungry and could on doing the same thing forever. The faceless man remarks that perhaps Milo will go on forever. Tock suggests that Milo use “his magic staff” and find out how long it will take. Milo calculates that it will take them over 800 years to finish.

Milo chooses to question the “man” about the 800 years to complete this unimportant project, and the man says that he wouldn’t have asked them to do it if he thought it was important.  

Quote

What could be more important than doing unimportant things? If you stop to do enough of them, you’ll never get to where you are going.

He laughs and introduces himself as the Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort and monster of habit.

As the Trivium continues to try and convince the trio to spend their time doing busy work, someone yells at them to run. So they run, and they run through some stuff, and eventually lose Trivium, but find themselves in a deep murky pit. The voice belongs to something that identifies as a long-nosed, green-eyed, curly-haired, wide-mouthed, thick-necked, broad-shouldered, round-bodies, short-armed, bowlegged, big-footed monster.

Milo uses his telescope and sees something that doesn’t match that description at all. The Demon of Insincerity hides and eventually flounces.

Spoiler

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Milo, Tock and Humbug climb out of the pit, and walk along until the entire mountain moves. Turns out it wasn’t a mountain at all, but the Gelatinous Giant.

The Gelatinous Giant is a giant, um, creature who is afraid of everything. Including ideas. He is a conformist who blends with the background. As he goes to eat Milo, Tock, and the Humbug, Milo reminds him of all the ideas that Azaz had given him earlier in the book. And so, the Gelatinous Giant was defeated. The trio is placed on a nearby peak and they start running forward, as more and more shadowy, scary demons come out to chase them.

Chapter 18: The Castle in the Air

They climb and run and finally find the highest peak, which has a “spidery spiral stair” which leads to the Castle in the Air.

In front of the first step is a little man, calling himself the official “Senses Taker” and he asks a thousand questions and asks them to fill out forms. As the demons close in and Milo & friends become more impatient, the Senses Taker switches to a new tactic – trying to entice them with things only they could see, smell, and hear. Milo is shown a circus, Tock gets to smell all the wonderful things (he’s a dog, so I imagine it to be cat poo. Gross, Tock.), and the Humbug hears people cheering for him. Milo, completely oblivious and sucked into the show, allows his bag to fall from his shoulder, spilling his gift of sound, which distracts them and breaks the spell.

The Senses taker helps people find what they aren’t looking for, hear what they’re not listening for, run after what they’re not chasing, and smell what isn’t even there. In a villainous speech, he claims to take the sense of purpose, duty, destroy the sense of proportion, but he can’t touch humor. FFS.

They run up the stairs. It sounds scary. The princesses of Rhyme and Reason tell them to come in and that they have been expecting them.

They sit down on comfy furniture and discuss their trip. Milo tries to apologize for the delay, but they shush him. They tell him it’s OK to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them.

Quote

 

“but it’s not just learning things that’s important. It’s learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters.”


 

There is also this quote:

Quote

 

You may not see it now, but whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes round the world; when a speck of dust falls to the ground, the entire planet weights a little more; and when you stamp your foot, the earth moves slightly off its course. Whenever you laugh, gladness spreads like the ripples in a pond; and whenever you’re sad, no one anywhere can be really happy. And it’s much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer.


 

And this

Quote

 

…many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But someday you’ll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.


 

And then the demons start to chop down the stairs and the castle starts to fly off into space. OBVIOUSLY, PHYSICS IS NOT PART OF THIS LESSON. SEE ABOVE QUOTE ON MOVING THE EARTH.

And so, they determine that sometimes, time can fly. The Princesses climb onto Tock, the watchdog, Milo grabs Tock’s tail, and the Humbug (who is a bug and should already be able to fly), grabs ahold of Milo’s feet and/or ankles.

Thoughts:

TWO MORE CHAPTERS. One which is REALLY short. I could finish it right now, but I think I’ll wait until tomorrow.

I do wonder if perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from the Trivium. Some of us are spending a lot of time doing a lot of unimportant work in our offices day in and day out so we can have a paycheck. See also the conformist giant. Actually, maybe the Gelatinous Giant is more of a Trump type figure. Hiding in plain site, trying to blend in. Then again, maybe not.

The Senses Taker is just a pain in the ass. So frustrating with the paperwork and the questions and the wasting of the time. See also TSA.

Anyway, I still love this book and love the “time flies” joke, even though it’s super cheesey.

Any suggestions for what else to read? I was thinking I might do another YA type book, just to balance out the depressing Game of Thrones Reread.

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WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo?

Posted

"And it’s much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer."

Can I cross stitch this and mail it to some of our favorite ignorance-loving fundies?

As far as classic YA books go, I love rereading Madeline L'Engle's books every so often. There's the Wrinkle In Time line and the Meet the Austins series. The title Meet the Austins sounds kind of lame, but it's pretty good. And some characters cross from the one set of books to the other.

More recently, there are Rick Riordan's mythology based series.  (Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and now Norse.) Or Kathy and Brendan Reichs' Virals series. I guess I'm a bit of a fan of YA fiction. I haven't read Game of Thrones yet. 

Thanks for making me smile!

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Elvis Presby

Posted

At 44 years old I am just reading TPT for the first time.  I am really enjoying the play on words everywhere in the book.

As far as YA goes, I really enjoyed Divergent, but post apocalyptic fiction is my absolute favorite genre.

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