Ways of walking through a wood

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Re-reading Eddie's poem "Whose Woods These Are", I am reminded of what Umberto Eco says in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods:1

There are two ways of walking through a wood. The first is to try one or several routes (so as to get out of the wood as fast as possible, say, or to reach the house of grandmother, Tom Thumb, or Hansel and Gretel); the second is to walk so as to discover what the wood is like and find out why some paths are accessible and others are not. (p. 27)

Eco is not only talking about woods. He is comparing walking through a wood to going through a narrative text. There is a model reader of the first level: he or she wants to know how the story ends; but there is also a model reader of the second level, whose intention you can guess.

Eco might have picked up this metaphor from Frost, who we all know applied walking in a wood to life. Which kind of walker are you?

Both illustrations above are by Gustave Doré: the first depicts a scene from Red Riding Hood and the second, Divine Comedy -- "Dante in the Dusky Woods".

Speaking of Red Riding Hood, Eco mentions an 'alchemical interpretation' of it:

[A]n Italian scholar has tried to prove that the fable refers to the process of extracting and treating minerals. Translating the fable into chemical formulas, he has identified Little Red Riding Hood as cinnabar, an artificial mercury sulfide which is as red as her hood is supposed to be. Thus, within herself, the child contains mercury in its pure state, which has to be separated from the sulphur. [...] The wolf stands for mercurous chloride, otherwise known as calomel (which means "beautiful black" in Greek). The stomach of the wolf is the alchemist's oven in which the cinnabar is transformed into mercury. (pp. 91-92)

However, Eco points out a flaw in this theory, which was identified by Valentina Pisanty. Why is Red Riding Hood still wearing a red hood instead of silver hood when she comes out of the beast's belly?

1Eliot's collection of essays, published in 1922, was titled The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.
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Where does ‘cliché’ come from?

"How They Met Themselves" (1860-64) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Umberto Eco once wrote, 'Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us, because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.' But where does 'cliché' come from?

Robert Macfarlane in Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007) answers:

It comes from the early nineteenth-century French term for a stereotype block, presumably due to the noise the blocks made whilst printing (clicher is a variant of the verb cliquer, to click). It existed in this literal meaning until the 1890s: the OED offers Andrew Lang, writing in Longwood’s Magazine in 1892, as providing the first usage of cliché as a metaphor meaning ‘A stereotyped expression, a commonplace phrase’. The coinage stuck, and the word cliché itself became a cliché, reproduced many times over to designate something reproduced many times over. (p. 160)

In a footnote, Macfarlane also explains the origin of 'stereotype':

It began as an eighteenth-century noun meaning 'A method of replicating a relief printing surface', but by 1850 had been abstracted to signify 'A thing continued or constantly repeated without change, esp. a phrase or formula, etc.; stereotyped diction or usage' (OED). (p. 160) 

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