Tenth in a series on love and marriage…
If you answer, with William Shakespeare’s Juliet, “that which we call a rose/By Any Other Name would smell as sweet”, then you have raised a basic question, the relation between what we call a thing and its reality. In its context, the line refers to Romeo’s last name that makes him her enemy:
Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? …O, be some other name![1]
Helen Keller, in her autobiography The Story of My Life, has a very different view of names:
Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we…
