Word: boojum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...July 18, 1874, a shy Oxford don visited his sisters at Guildford, in the south of England. There, part of a poem came to mind. It was only eight words long, but the phrase would haunt generations: "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see." Charles Dodgson subtitled his completed work "An Agony in Eight Fits," but it is really the final volume of an unintended trilogy, a trip to Wonderland without Alice...
...Snark is, in Paul Tillich's fashionable phrase, every man's ultimate concern. This is the great search motif of the poem, the quest for an ultimate good. But this motif is submerged in a stronger motif, the dread, the agonizing dread, of ultimate failure. The Boojum is more than death. It is the end of all searching. It is final, absolute extinction, in Auden's phrase, 'the dreadful Boojum of Nothingness...
...Snark is, in Paul Tillich's fashionable phrase, every man's ultimate concern. This is the great search motif of the poem, the quest for an ultimate good. But this motif is submerged in a stronger motif, the dread, the agonizing dread, of ultimate failure. The Boojum is more than death. It is the end of all searching. It is final, absolute extinction, in Auden's phrase, 'the dreadful Boojum of Nothingness...