I thought of writing on Of sumptuary laws this week, because it had a great premise: if you want to get the masses to cease “vain and insane expenditures for the table and for clothes,” don’t restrict them and make them appropriate only for princes; make them commonplace and watch as the masses lose interest in them.
Instead, I decided to write about Of names, a little meditation on the nature (and transience) of celebrity, fame, self-invention and brand awareness.
M. sets out by telling us how throughout history certain names seem “earmarked by fate” in the genealogy of princes: Ptolemy, Henry, Charles, Baldwin, William/Guillaume. In fact, we learn, Henry II once held a feast in which he divvied up the knights by name: there were 110 named William.
Names are funny like that. I’ve only met one other Gil in my life (not a Gilbert, of whom I’ve met plenty), and no one with my brother’s name, Boaz. Having names like this in suburban NJ in the ’70s got a bit rough, but I’m sure the other kids would’ve found something else to goof on, if they didn’t have our names.
By the late ’80s, we would find ourselves in a world in which the biggest action-movie stars were named Bruce, Arnold and Sylvester (later followed by a Wesley), so I suppose some progress was made since M.’s time. (Of course, at present, we actually have no big action-movie stars.)
Montaigne later moves from the felicity of pleasant-sounding names to the inevitabilities of being forgotten and/or debased, as a function of calling “everyone by the name of his land or lordship”:
Coats of arms have no more security than surnames. I bear azure powdered with trefoils or, with a lions paw of the same, armed gules in fesse. What privilege has this design to remain privately in my house? A son-in-law will transport it into another family; some paltry buyer will make of it his first coat of arms; there is nothing which more change and confusion is found.
It’s here that he grows most ruminative, for he’s finally latched onto the subject he seems to care about the most; how we accommodate ourselves toward death. Why focus so intently on symbols of glory and reputation, he wonders, remarking, “Oh, what a brave faculty is hope, which, in a mortal subject and in a moment, usurps infinity, immensity, eternity!”
Soon, names themselves become part of the same group of symbols for M., reduced to penstrokes and syllables: “What is that [name], when all is said and done, but a sound, or three or four strokes of a pen, so easy to vary in the first place?” The great martial names that he cites throughout his works are benumbed by repetition over generations. Ultimately, he asks, “What prevents my groom from calling himself Pompey the Great?”
But after all, even if he does, what means or powers exist that can attach and join this glorious sound or the honored pen strokes that represent this name to my groom when he is dead, or to that other Pompey who had his head cut off in Egypt, in such a way that they can get advantage out of them? “Do you think buried ghosts, or ashes, care for this?” [Virgil]
He ends with an epigram from Juvenal about how Romans, barbarians and Greeks “endured all risks and labors with this aim, / so much more burning is the thirst for fame / than that for virtue.”
All of which would seem pretty run-of-the-mill except for the fact that M. never gets around to discussing God or heaven. That is, he denounces the pursuit of fame, but outside of a small reference to virtue, doesn’t discuss an alternative. He’s saying that the fixation on “making one’s name” is inane, but he doesn’t postulate some greater glory to be found in the hereafter.
And you guys wonder why I keep subjecting you to this on a Monday morning.
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