Figuring the Snark

As it first appeared in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, Snark it selves didn’t clearly described. Carroll left it as an unimaginable creature and let our imagination gives us our own Snark. However, it created lots of curiosity about Snark and off course, the poem it selves.

Lots of people come with their own theory about what kind of Snark look like. This created another term called Snark hunting. Off course it is not trying to catch the real Snark, since it is totally fiction, but trying to find the closer definition of Snark. There are lots of arguments about the Snark, from the linguistic aspects of Snark, Snark shape, and many more. One of the popular writings about Snark is The Annotated Snark by Martin Gardner. In his book, Gardner recorded that Lewis Carroll him selves admitted that he didn’t have clear picture about the Snark. He wanted everyone picture the Snark with their imagination.

It is very interesting that an imaginary poem could create enthusiasm to hunting the Snark. Just like written in the poem, the Snark is a peculiar creature that cannot be captured in a commonplace way. Above all, courage is required during a Snark hunt. Snark lives in your imagination and it needs your own courage to find it deep in your mind.

The Dark Ages

When I was growing up in a slum in Israel, I devoutly believed that knowledge and education will set me free and catapult me from my miserable circumstances into a glamorous world of happy learning. But now, as an adult, I find myself in an alien universe where functional literacy is non-existent even in developed countries, where “culture” means merely sports and music, where science is decried as evil and feared by increasingly hostile and aggressive masses, and where irrationality in all its forms (religiosity, the occult, conspiracy theories) flourishes.

The few real scholars and intellectuals left are on the retreat, back into the ivory towers of a century ago. Increasingly, their place is taken by self-taught “experts”, narcissistic bloggers, wannabe “authors” and “auteurs”, and partisan promoters of (often self-beneficial) “causes”.

Dismal results ensue: the Wikipedia “encyclopedia” is “edited” by anonymous users with unlimited access to its contents and no credentials; fads like environmentalism and alternative “medicine” spread malignantly and seek to silence dissidents, sometimes by violent means; the fare served by the media now consists exclusively of soap operas and reality TV shows; Reading is on terminal decline; with few exceptions, the “new media” are a hodgepodge of sectarian view and fabricated “news”; the few credible sources of reliable information have long been drowned in a cacophony of fakes and phonies.

It is a sad mockery of the idea of progress. The more texts we make available online, the more research is published, the more books are written – the less educated people are, the more they rely on visuals and sounds rather than the written word, the more they seek to escape and be anesthetized rather than be challenged and provoked.

Even the ever-sliming minority who do wish to be enlightened are inundated by a suffocating and unmanageable avalanche of indiscriminate data, comprised of both real and pseudo-science. There is no way to tell the two apart, so a “democracy of knowledge” reins where everyone is equally qualified and everything goes and is equally merited. This relativism is dooming the twenty-first century to become the beginning of a new “Dark Age”, hopefully a mere interregnum between two periods of genuine enlightenment.