You meet someone named Philip and you don’t think again about the name. It’s more like the sound of a pavlovian bell, or maybe like a calling card, with no meaning and no existence outside its connection to the person named. You may or may not know, but even if you do it wouldn’t cross your mind, that the name is composed of two parts, philo, meaning love, the same as in philosophy or philology, and hippo, meaning horse, which may sound strange to most ears now because hippopotamus, literally the water horse, has lost the suffix in common speech, now it’s only a horse, and perhaps that’s why the horse in Philip is lost too, why the love is also lost, we would not dare an explanation. In any case, the name means quite literally lover of horses, and if somehow you were able to keep this in mind, would you then consider this man and imagine if his personality matched his name. Would you ask if the name was given metaphorically, because he was a lover of adventure, or of duty, or of loyalty, perhaps he was a man who preferred longer horizons and goals, climbing atop animality to see and go further, or perhaps even a more literal descriptor, that guy, Philip, he really likes horses.
Or let’s say you meet someone named Barbara. Would you know or remember that, much like barbarian, her name means foreigner, and comes from a rather unflattering and dismissive imitation of unfamiliar speech by the hellenes, bar bar bar, the barking of the outsider, who considered anyone other than themselves to speak like dogs. And would you then look at her, and see how beautiful she is, and imagine that her name perhaps reveals something wild, untamed, forever out of reach, the kind of woman that brings down kingdoms.
Most people have no idea what the names of the people they meet actually mean, or even perhaps that they mean anything at all. Even if they did learn them once, they have forgotten, and if not forgotten, they never come to mind, and are never considered at all, what does it matter, what’s in a name, those are famous words for a reason. And after all, names are given to us when we were born or even before, and can we really trust the wisdom of those who gave them.
Thus, the idea that names, especially given names, might hold a key to the mysteries of the people who wear them, who go by them, who respond to them when someone says them out loud, the names that lovers cry out when in the rapture of pleasure or that other one of grief, is not particularly sound in reasoning. Yet it’s still true that those names that are given and not chosen used to have meanings, and they were once common knowledge, so common as to not be names at all, but descriptors, as in, That man, the son of so and so, he really loves horses, Yes, yes he does. Or, Look at that beautiful foreign woman, isn’t she beautiful, Yes, yes, she is.
He knew all of this, and kept it in mind at all times, and when his best friend, the person he most admired in the world, and the girl he loved in secret and had loved in secret since the first time he saw her in middle school, Philip and Barbara, started dating, he tried to find some logic and some meaning in this tragic twist of fate through the realm of names, but despite all his knowledge and research into onomastics and philology and etymology, he found none.
His obsession with names was rather easy to explain, it started early when he realized he didn’t like the one that was given to him. Mostly he didn’t like it because he had to share it. It was the same one his father had, and his father before that, and going back for a couple more generations. It had a history, and expectation. And he never had any interest in it whatsoever. His interest lay in names, especially the given kind. And perhaps they are called given names not because we receive them from our parents, but because we give them out so readily, it’s the first thing everyone knows about everyone, Hi, my name is so and so, Hello, I’m such and such. Even if that is not the reason, he never had found any impediment whenever he desired to know the name of someone, so he could then think of what it meant, and imagine how it might fit or not fit the person in question. That is, until he met her.
At first, the university library was his refuge from both the classes he had no interest in and from seeing his best friend and the girl he was infatuated with walking around the school together, rubbing their happiness in his face. He chose it because of the books and the quiet, but he kept coming back even after getting over his heartbreak, and the reason was her. Like him, she always came in alone, and always studied alone, for hours. He tried to read into her features, her expressions, and gestures, what kind of name she would have. He even thought ahead and decided to approach her with, This is going to sound random, but is your name by any chance… but he never could come up with one he thought would fit.
Her name was definitely not Mary, nor was it Monica, not Sara, not Sally, not Nadia, not Natalie, but he found it hard to think of her or look upon her and remember the meanings of all those names, as well as all the other ones. He just had to go and ask, and it took a few weeks for him to get the courage. But after so much thought and anticipation, the opening words were even stranger than any he had rehearsed, first because he walked brusquely and did not give the young woman time to raise her head from the book she was reading and acknowledge his presence, and then because how how quickly and tersely he said, What’s your name. And her reply was no less strange, and not what he expected, and one he never received before, I can’t tell you.
Disoriented and without bothering to say another word or look at the woman again, he went back to his seat. It would be easy to find out her name, he probably knew someone who knew someone who knew who she was, But then why the mystery, why can’t she tell me, it’s only a name. And he couldn’t believe he had uttered those words and wasn’t even sure it if it was aloud or only in his mind. He needed to know, but he did not want to cheat.
He asked some people he knew, Do you know the name of that girl, and they would start to say, Yeah, it’s… and he stopped them in their tracks. He just wanted to know if it was common knowledge. Apparently it was, thus the plot thickened. She hid her name not as a general rule, but from him, in that moment. Why. The next day he went back to the library. She was already there, so he wasted no time and asked her, Why can’t you tell me your name. And what she said again surprised him, A name is a very intimate thing, it is the whole meaning of ourselves condensed, or it should be. And she said it so naturally, and so assertively, and so sweetly, it was the most beautiful any woman had ever been. And this time he did not run away, but said, Then I would like to know you, and then meet you.
In the end, it was very fitting that her name was Eve, and that he only learned it after they became one flesh, because he was her first, and she was his.
