Now, when I said goodbye to the White Knight in that penultimate scene, I could not stop the tears from flooding down my face as I said “I hope it encouraged him.” I watched him, losing his things out of the hole in his sack, as he trotted on alone, unawares. I wished there was something I could do for him. I hated Alice Liddell for abandoning Charles Dodgson by fleeing her childhood into womanhood. I hated that my dad left chicken pot pies on the stovetop for a week, insisting they didn’t need to be refrigerated, or that he made the red cabbage three weeks before Christmas dinner, and that the cards he played solitaire with no longer had images on them. I tried to block out the mornings I had woken up to find him, still sleepless, staring at reams of papers on the dining room table, full of tiny, neatly written mathematical equations, numbers doubling and quadrupling until he ran out of space in the millions. (I later discovered he was trying to ascertain how many humans had had to copulate in order to produce him, and how many of those couplings were likely rapes. “How much violence was I the product of?” he said, looking helpless and childlike.) I wonder, in retrospect, if these moments were signs of a typical eccentric Englishman who’d never had to do a single domestic duty until his wife died, or of mental illness, or early signs of the dementia that would be diagnosed many years later. I suppose I’ll never know, and there is something I can’t help but find funny about how closely these states might resemble each other.