What I tell you three times is true
Charles Dodgson was a Mathematics Don at Christchurch College in Oxford, but he is better known by his alter ego, Lewis Carroll and for the Alice stories (Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass) which he made up to while away the hours on Summer afternoons and entertain the young Alice Liddell as they punted along the river Thames and Isis.
The Alice books, (with their incredible cast of the White Rabbit; the Mad Hatter, sleepy doormouse and March Hare; The Queen of Hearts who cries “Off with their Heads”; The Carpenter and the Walrus; the Jabberwocky; Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee and the Cheshire Cat … to name just a few), are quite well known here. I have to admit, however, that I was never really fond of them as a child. They always appeared to me as impossible tales and were imbued with a dark and dreary atmosphere with musty Victorian England which even the magnificent drawings by Tenniel could not dispel.
I was only later as a student at Oxford, when I came across the “Annotated Alice” by Martin Gardiner, that I began to appreciate what a great piece of literature they represented. I went to see an exhibition about Dodgson’s life and work in Christchurch and came across a less well work which I took an instant liking to: The Hunting of the Snark, a nonsense poem that was subtitled ‘An Agony in Eight Fits’.
It describes “the impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature” … A ship is manned by a crew of ten, all beginning with the letter B: the Bellman; Boots; Bonnet Maker; Barrister; Broker; Billiard Maker; Banker; Butcher; Baker and a Beaver (who had, apparently, “… saved them from wreck, Though none of the sailors knew how.”) and after sailing across the ocean, (navigating their course using his map – a blank sheet of paper), to bring them to a strange land in order to hunt a mysterious creature called a Snark.
Each of the crew is given a pivotal role in the tale, and the poem is littered with made up words like Snark and Boojum, evocative phrases like “Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes”, “They threatened its life with a railway share” and the closing line “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see” which, according to the author, was the first line to be written.
Unlike the Alice books which were written with an audience of children in mind, The Hunting of the Snark is a much darker tale and the drawings by Henry Holiday much more like caricatures than those of Tenniel for the Alice books, and yet I found the poem much more attractive than Alice. My attention was grabbed from the opening lines:
“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”
It might seem a bit arrogant to claim that: “What I tell you three times is true”.
Now, three is a special number … Of course, it is easy to see connections and assign significance to events and different numbers, (two, four, seven, forty …) also have symbolism attached to them, but the number three does seem to carry with it a special significance:
- The Pythagoreans considered three to be the first real number;
- The triangle, with three sides, is the simplest geometrical figure that can be drawn in that it has the least number of sides … you can’t have a geometrical figure with just two sides; it is also the strongest in that it is rigid and cannot be deformed or sheared as a square, or rectangle, or other polygon can be.
- In some religions, three is a sacred number:
- Consider the Trinity of Christianity – Father Son and Holy Spirit and compare with the three deities in Hinduism – Brhama (the creator), Vishku, (the preserver) and Shiva (the destroyer)
- Jonah spends three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish …
- Three wise men from the east visit the baby Jesus …
- Peter denies Jesus three times after the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemene
- Jesus rises from the tomb on the third day …
- It’s a sign of good luck: consider the phrase … “Third time lucky” …
- One of the typical scenarios in myths, legends and fairy tales where the hero is often “three tasks”, “three wishes” or three chances to answer a conundrum … and overcoming all obstacles to be successful on the third attempt ;
- In rituals many things are repeated three times;
- An ancient rebuke has it that: To steal from me once brings shame on you, but to steal from me twice brings shame on me!, … this is the third time!
Journalists often look for corroboration before they will publish a particular controversial story … information from just one source could be just gossip, but from two independent sources it can be given greater credence … and if the same information comes from from three independent sources, then this implies greater confidence in its veracity. Greater confidence maybe, but certainty cannot be guaranteed. And, in this case, the three utterances are from the same source – the Bellman, himself.
However, there is something behind this.
Repetition is a basic principle in Education. I came across an excellent exposition of this when I first came to Kyrgyzstan, when a former Captain in the Soviet Air-force told me of the principle used in giving instructions: tell them three times … Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you have told them … then finally, get them to repeat it, to make sure that they have understood what you have told them.
It’s a bit like making notes … if you listen to a lecture or read a passage in a book … no matter how good the material you hear it or read it just once … but if you make notes then you hear it, think about it to sieve through the information to find the most relevant points, and then write it down … which means that you have a greater chance of both remembering it and understanding it.
Bishkek