Word: snarking
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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...
...recent years, the Snark has been as hard to find in bookstores as it was on the ocean. The hard-cover book has been out of print for a decade. Now, on the occasion of Charles Dodgson's sesquicentennial, the matter has been rectified with Martin Gardner's frabjous Annotated Snark. In its oversized, endlessly informative pages, Gardner, author...
...make, for example, of the Beaver and the Butcher as "They returned hand-in-hand, and the Bellman, unmanned/ (For a moment) with noble emotion,/ Said 'This amply repays all the wearisome days/ We have spent on the billowy ocean!' " Or: " 'I engage with the Snark-every night after dark-/ In a dreamy delirious fight:/ I serve it with greens in those shadowy scenes,/ And I use it for striking a light...
...Snark is a poem about being and nonbeing, an existential poem, a poem of existential agony. The Bellman's map is the map that charts the course of humanity; blank because we possess no information about where we are or whither we drift. The 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...
...Snark is a poem about being and nonbeing, an existential poem, a poem of existential agony. The Bellman's map is the map that charts the course of humanity; blank because we possess no information about where we are or whither we drift. The 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...