Alice was thinking very hard when the Cheshire Cat appeared — first the grin, then the eyes, then the rest of him, as if existence itself were arriving in stages.
“I don’t understand necessity,” Alice said. “Everyone insists that things must be a certain way. But no one can quite say who’s doing the insisting.”
“That’s because no one is,” said the Cat cheerfully. “Which is why it’s so funny.”
Alice frowned. “But surely if something is necessary, it has to be enforced.”
“Only if you think necessity is a sort of shouting,” replied the Cat. “Most people do. They imagine a great cosmic schoolmaster rapping the universe’s knuckles whenever it misbehaves.”
“And there isn’t one?” asked Alice.
The Cat’s grin widened. “If there were, I’d have met him. I get around.”
“Well then,” Alice said slowly, “why can’t things just be otherwise?”
“They can,” said the Cat. “Just not and still be the same thing.”
Alice sat down on a tree root. “That sounds like a trick.”
“Of course it does. All good necessities are.”
The Cat began to fade, leaving the grin hovering thoughtfully.
“Look at it this way,” the grin continued. “A triangle must have three sides. Not because anyone forbids four — but because once you add one, you’re no longer talking about a triangle. Nothing is punished. Nothing is stopped. You’ve simply wandered off without noticing.”
“So necessity is about staying put?” Alice asked.
“About staying coherent,” said the Cat. “Systems are terribly picky that way.”
“But in physics,” Alice objected, “they talk about laws — things that must happen.”
“Yes,” said the Cat. “That’s because ‘constraint’ doesn’t sound nearly important enough. Humans like their necessities to feel muscular.”
The rest of the Cat vanished, leaving only the grin, now floating freely.
“In truth,” it said, “necessity is just what remains when you refuse to change the rules halfway through describing something.”
“And if you do change them?”
“Oh, you’re perfectly free to,” said the grin. “You just won’t be describing that system anymore.”
The grin lingered a moment longer.
“No commands,” it added. “No enforcement. Just the quiet refusal of meaning to follow you somewhere it cannot survive.”
Then even the grin disappeared.
Alice noticed that nothing in the world had moved at all.
Yet everything felt a little clearer.
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