The Message in the Bottle Irony

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A question without an answer

The author has a dream: he wants to know what a man should do when “he finds himself living” after “an age has ended” and he “can no longer understand himself.” The main reason of this inability to find the meaning is because “the theories of man of the former age no longer work” and “the theories of the new age are not yet known,” for not even “the name of the new age is known,” and so “everything is upside down” and “people feel bad when they should feel good.” The irony of the situation is that the same story happens every 100 years; the world transforms and people start struggling to find balance in life.

Unseen connections and hidden meanings

The educator who teaches his students biology or poetry is “unaware of a whole ensemble of relations” which exist between “the student and the dogfish” and “between the student and the Shakespeare sonnet.” In other words, the student who wants to get a dogfish or a Shakespeare sonnet “may have the greatest difficulty in salvaging the creature itself from the educational package in which it is presented.” The “great difficulty” is that the educator is not aware that there is a difficulty. The main irony is that we – people – create the frames which we later want to break.

Importance

No one is going to argue with the fact that science plays an increasingly important role. However, there are many people who have doubts about “the importance of a study of language.” The irony of it is that they think it is rational to invest time and money in study of “a solar eclipse or rat behavior” but not in the study of a man himself. The author believes that “as soon as one scratches the surface of the familiar” and “comes face to face with the nature of language,” one also finds himself “face to face with the nature of man.”

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