The Phantom Tollbooth

“Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.”

The Whether Man is the first person Milo meets on his strange journey. This man is completely unwilling to make up his mind; instead, to be safe, he predicts that anything might occur. Technically, this is true, but it’s useless. It’s the first of many things Milo will hear that sound wise but lack rhyme or reason.

“‘I guess I just wasn’t thinking,’ said Milo. ‘PRECISELY,’ shouted the dog as his alarm went off again. ‘Now you know what you must do.’ ‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ admitted Milo, feeling quite stupid. ‘Well,’ continued the watchdog impatiently, ‘since you got here by not thinking, it seems reasonable to expect that, in order to get out, you must start thinking.’”

The watchdog—his body a giant alarm clock—reprimands Milo for having a lazy mind. Milo learns that to get out of a bad situation, especially one entered into through thoughtlessness, a person needs to think of a way out. It’s Milo’s first lesson in a land that will teach him many things about how to use his mind.

“‘I never knew words could be so confusing,’ Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog’s ear. ‘Only when you use a lot to say a little,’ answered Tock.”

Dictionopolis grows and sells letters for placement in words; the city fathers don’t much care if they’re used sensibly as long as they’re used. Milo hears officials speak eloquently in phrases that make little sense, and Tock comments that the realm’s top officers have a knack for using a lot of words to say nothing. The author thus pokes fun at bureaucrats who care more for the correct procedure than for being helpful.

“[T]oday people use as many words as they can and think themselves very wise for doing so. For always remember that while it is wrong to use too few, it is often far worse to use too many.”

The Official Which, elderly great-aunt to King Azaz, tried to limit the use of words until the city’s residents stopped talking, which brought ruin. Now imprisoned, she accepts that people need to talk, but she also recognizes that sometimes they say too much. Hers is a lesson in traveling the middle path between too much and too little.

“Words and numbers are of equal value, for, in the cloak of knowledge, one is warp and the other woof. It is no more important to count the sands than it is to name the stars.”

This decision by the princesses Rhyme and Reason speaks eloquently to the usefulness of the main building blocks of thought. It fails to satisfy the brother kings—Azaz, ruler of words, and the Mathemagician, overseer of numbers—whose endless quarrel over which of them is more important requires a winner and a loser. In their angry, competitive blindness, the kings fail to see that their works complement each other and that without the one, the other is useless. Instead, they imprisoned the princesses, and the kingdom ceased to have Rhyme or Reason.

“‘Now, young man, what can you do to entertain us? Sing songs? Tell stories? Compose sonnets? Juggle plates? Do tumbling tricks? Which is it?’ ‘I can’t do any of those things,’ admitted Milo. ‘What an ordinary little boy,’ commented the king. ‘Why, my cabinet members can do all sorts of things. The duke here can make mountains out of molehills. The minister splits hairs. The count makes hay while the sun shines. The earl leaves no stone unturned. And the undersecretary,’ he finished ominously, ‘hangs by a thread. Can’t you do anything at all?’”

King Azaz’s comment indicates his city’s obsession with words as if they’re more important than anything else. This single-minded focus entirely misses the value of things other than letter combinations. It escapes the king that Milo might be a child whose gentle behavior and compassion for others mark him as exceptional. It’s also true that these traits escape the notice of Milo himself: The tollbooth intends his journey through the Lands Beyond to reveal to him, among other things, his own value as an attentive, thinking person.

“Milo looked around at everyone busily stuffing himself and then back at his own unappetizing plate. It certainly didn’t look worth eating, and he was so very hungry. ‘Here, try some somersault,’ suggested the duke. ‘It improves the flavor.’ ‘Have a rigmarole,’ offered the count, passing the breadbasket. ‘Or a ragamuffin,’ seconded the minister. ‘Perhaps you’d care for a synonym bun,’ suggested the duke. ‘Why not wait for your just desserts?’ mumbled the earl indistinctly, his mouth full of food. ‘How many times must I tell you not to bite off more than you can chew?’ snapped the undersecretary, patting the distressed earl on the back.”

At the Dictionopolis royal banquet, words decide everything: If it’s not spoken, it’s not eaten. Expressions and sayings are taken literally; nothing is more important than how things are expressed. The scene is an example of the author’s cleverly inventive use of words and puns to make a point about the silliness of verbal obsessions.

“‘How can they eat dinner right after a banquet?’ asked Milo. ‘SCANDALOUS!’ shouted the king. ‘We’ll put a stop to it at once. From now on, by royal command, everyone must eat dinner before the banquet.’ ‘But that’s just as bad,’ protested Milo. ‘You mean just as good,’ corrected the Humbug. ‘Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things.’ ‘I don’t know which side of anything to look at,’ protested Milo. ‘Everything is so confusing and all your words only make things worse.’”

Words are important only if they serve a purpose. Speaking nonsense, or making logically useless arguments, as people seem to do all the time in Dictionopolis, makes a farce of communication. Beneath all the silly banter lies a subtle lesson for Milo: Not only are the rules of speech rendered useless when obeyed rigidly to no purpose, but knowledge itself, when bandied about without reason, also serves no one.

“‘There must be something we can do about it.’ ‘Pass a law,’ the Humbug suggested brightly. ‘We have almost as many laws as words,’ grumbled the king.”

King Azaz realizes that his many proclamations have done nothing to ease the general nonsense that’s taken over his kingdom. Perhaps the overuse of words, including the endless legal edicts, has driven the citizens to distraction.

“‘[I]n my family everyone is born in the air, with his head at exactly the height it’s going to be when he’s an adult, and then we all grow toward the ground.’ […] ‘Oh no,’ said Milo seriously. ‘In my family we all start on the ground and grow up, and we never know how far until we actually get there.’ ‘What a silly system.’ The boy laughed. ‘Then your head keeps changing its height and you always see things in a different way? Why, when you’re fifteen things won’t look at all the way they did when you were ten, and at twenty everything will change again. […] We always see things from the same angle,’ the boy continued. ‘It’s much less trouble that way.’”

The floating boy, Alec Bings, argues that it’s better to have the same point of view than to be bothered by a changing perspective. He believes that everyone has their own point of view, and, as a boy who can see through things and can consider alternate perspectives, he prefers to rest his mind by keeping to a single point of view. It’s an odd and ironic way to look at the world, especially from a boy who already appreciates the value of seeing things from different angles.

“‘Do you know where we are?’ asked Milo. ‘Certainly,’ he replied, ‘we’re right here on this very spot. Besides, being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it’s a matter of not knowing where you aren’t—and I don’t care at all about where I’m not.’”

Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat and “Mad” Hatter echo through the story as the characters—in this instance, the floating boy, Alec Bings—express charmingly non-logical attitudes about the world. Milo’s perspective stretches during these encounters; the author also wants to shake up readers’ perspectives, offering them surprising and creative ways of thinking.

“The sun was dropping slowly from sight, and stripes of purple and orange and crimson and gold piled themselves on top of the distant hills. The last shafts of light waited patiently for a flight of wrens to find their way home, and a group of anxious stars had already taken their places.”

The author captures, in a few shimmering words, a sense of the Lands Beyond as a fantastical place where nature cares about its denizens and life has purpose and meaning. It merits protecting, and Milo can see that his quest, to save the realm from chaos, is a worthy cause.

“‘[T]here is no such illness as lack of noise.’ ‘Of course not,’ replied the doctor […] ‘that’s what makes it so difficult to cure. I only treat illnesses that don’t exist: that way, if I can’t cure them, there’s no harm done—just one of the precautions of the trade.’”

Dr. Dischord insists that people need his medicine to cure themselves of the need for pleasant sounds. Given the highly urbanized state of noise in the modern world, such a remedy might seem useful, but Milo and his friends wisely turn down the offer. It’s the author’s way of commenting on how people sometimes make a virtue of bad things, as if that compensates for the loss of the good.

“‘Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn?’ she inquired. ‘Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause in a roomful of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re all alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful, if you listen carefully.’”

The Soundkeeper has a practiced ear, not only for the subtleties of sounds but also for the many varieties of silence. She mourns the public’s loss of appreciation for all things audible. Her sensitivity to the nuances of sound and silence are part of the author’s attempt to inspire in readers an interest in looking at things more deeply and from different perspectives.

“[A]s long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?”

As in Dictionopolis, the denizens of Digitopolis treat their skills merely as things to be done correctly, with little concern for their usefulness. Once again, the bureaucratic obsession with procedure at the expense of utility has taken over the citizenry. Milo and his friends must thread their way through a morass of mindless mentation to get what they need and continue their journey.

“‘There’s nothing to it […] if you have a magic staff.’ […] ‘But it’s only a big pencil,’ the Humbug objected, tapping at it with his cane. ‘True enough,’ agreed the Mathemagician; ‘but once you learn to use it, there’s no end to what you can do.’”

The Mathemagician’s pencil staff can perform amazing feats, but it’s also the author’s sly hint to young readers that ordinary pencils can do wonderful things in real life and that mastering them at school and elsewhere will increase a child’s powers. Yet again, the story points—this time with a pencil—to the advantages of education and the acquisition of useful skills.

“Infinity is a dreadfully poor place. They can never manage to make ends meet.”

The author’s whimsical sense of wordplay crops up everywhere in the story, including this comment to Milo from a denizen of Digitopolis, the city of arithmetic. The Lands Beyond are chock-full of absurdities and non-logical impossibilities, which inspire in Milo—and, the author hopes, in his readers—a great interest in the endless possibilities of words and math, the two main pillars of learning. Infinite things go on forever and never reach their end; likewise, curiosity and education are always open-ended. As long as he’s willing to think, Milo thus will never be bored again.

“‘[O]ne of the nicest things about mathematics, or anything else you might care to learn, is that many of the things which can never be, often are. You see,’ he went on, ‘it’s very much like your trying to reach Infinity. You know that it’s there, but you just don’t know where—but just because you can never reach it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth looking for.’”

The .58 boy points out that many impossible things can be expressed in math and used to figure out other things that are possible. Milo’s respect for numbers grows: They can reckon with anything, even absurdities. It’s a nice power to possess, and it’s available to anyone.

“‘Everyone here knows so much more than I do,’ thought Milo […] ‘I’ll have to do a lot better if I’m going to rescue the princesses.’”

The need for more knowledge—and with it, more understanding of the world around him—impresses on Milo the importance of learning. He’s happy, though, to see that many people already know many things, so education is a reachable goal.

“‘Everything in Digitopolis is much too difficult for me.’ The Mathemagician nodded knowingly and stroked his chin several times. ‘You’ll find,’ he remarked gently, ‘that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort.’”

Milo learns that he has a lot to learn before he can be truly helpful to the Lands Beyond. The task seems daunting, but Milo has discovered that the world of learning also includes many fascinating facts. His educational journey thus will be not a drudgery, but an intriguing adventure, one that’s in some ways as compelling as the many adventures he’s already experienced with his traveling companions.

“If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won’t have the time. For there’s always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing.”

The Terrible Trivium, a demon who lives in the Mountains of Ignorance, wants Milo and his companions to waste time and never achieve their quest to liberate the princesses Rhyme and Reason. Trivium understands too well the human propensity to put off important tasks with busy work, and he puts that knowledge to good use by delaying the travelers for several days with pointless labor. As with the lesson of the Doldrums, where Milo gets lost because he isn’t thinking, the mountain demons parlay the boy’s fear of failure into wasted effort. It’s one of the author’s warnings to young readers: Putting off important goals can prevent them from being achieved.

“‘You must never feel badly about making mistakes,’ explained Reason quietly, ‘as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.’ ‘But there’s so much to learn,’ [Milo] said, with a thoughtful frown. ‘Yes, that’s true,’ admitted Rhyme; ‘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.’”

Milo’s adventure comes into focus as he speaks with Rhyme and Reason, who explain to him that the value of learning isn’t just the facts acquired but the experience of learning them and the wisdom that the process teaches. It’s not just the facts Milo learns that make him wise but also understanding how those facts fit together with other facts in useful ways.

“[M]any 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.”

Many facts may seem trivial, but only later do they show their true power, when the student discovers their usefulness. Learning thus is an adventure that continues to pay off long afterward. The journey of education leads to strange places that seem unimportant, but all of it builds up into a vast collection of understanding and wisdom.