“There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense but a string of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.” – H.D.T. , “A Yankee in Canada” in Excursions
“Men are more obedient at first to words than ideas. They mind names more than things. Read them a lecture on ‘Education,’ naming that subject, and they will think that they have heard something important, but call it ‘Transcendentalism,’ and they will think it moonshine.” – H.D.T., February 13, 1860
Dear Henry –
A man of contradictions, you were, just like your buddy Walt Whitman: you wrote that there is all the poetry in the world in a name, yet disparaged naming as a distraction from the essence of that which is named. What gives?
Before I mire myself in examining that question, though, I want to reflect on the meaning of a name, and the many purposes naming might serve:
Calling things by their proper names gives them an identity unique in the world. Naming something makes it “a beautiful or unique snowlake,” as when one assigns a singularity of identity and purpose to the named object or person.
While I was traveling in Kenya, my friends there called me “Anne.” While Hannah is my chosen and preferred name, to my Kenyan friends, I was “Anne,” and so held a unique place in their universe distinct from the one I held while at home in the United States. Situationally, names may change, or be supplanted entirely: as when my friends called me by the nickname “Puffin” while I was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, or your classmates taunted you with the name “Judge” as a child (garnered by your serious demeanor, I suppose?)
By contrast, descriptives may be used in place of names to diminish the individuality or importance of that someone or something, and in doing so, distance onself emotionally from a situation that would otherwise call for too much of our sympathy. A correspondent of mine makes a habit of referring to people by their behavioral patterns or geography: “the amazon down the road” or “the psychotic seal.” Not long ago, in a time and place far removed from the world you lived in, people of one collective referred to another as “cockroaches,” enabling the slaughter of millions. Summarily then, a name is something you’re given – or denied, to a specific purpose.
A name could also be an appellation you choose: In a seeming rejection of your old self, and in characteristic contempt of authority, you flipped your name around, from David Henry, your birth name, to “Henry David,” the extraordinary name we know you by today.
A name can also serve to identify, categorize and classify things, as when studying your dear friends, the plants and animals of our worldly habitat. Something tells me that your statement regarding the poetry of a name was inspired by this particular view on the subject.
A name can be aspirational, created and built upon gradually as one moves through life, as in, “I am going to make a name for myself.” Which, indeed, you did, though posthumously and with great social and cultural impact.
So, having unpacked all the different uses of a name, I return to the quandary of your clashing statements. Yes, calling things by their names gives them an identity and singles them out, giving them an exceptional quality – yet by assigning too much attention to a name and its meaning, we run the risk of detracting from its possibilities, weighing it down with too many ideas, opinions and misconceptions, borne of the inevitable stories people create and tell one another. In the philosophy of language, two strains of meaning comprise the gap between language and reality: conceptualization, which defines something (as a name would), and association (the meaning people assign to it).
How many a reader has misunderstood your name, Henry, and, in the quagmire of interpretation and analysis, failed to appreciate the shockingly multi-dimensional story behind something so giant?
Could it be that names serve to specialize and beautify, even as they are corrupted by associative meaning and interpretation? We can never fully escape the labels they confer, any more than a sea urchin could gaze at the surface of the ocean and wonder what it might be like to lodge itself to an oak tree instead of a rock. Yet we literally can’t live without them. They embody entire stories, of evolving and breathing entities, of universes within universes.
How we contradict ourselves, Henry. We contain multitudes.
Yours as Ever,
Hannah
