What’s in a name?
In the middle of a bustling city lies a quiet garden. And in that garden is nestled a small Victorian building of brick and stone. I meander my way through this garden’s paths on silent, sun drenched mornings to unlock the door and await visitors. It is one of life’s magical moments to unlock that door and stand all alone in the doorway looking in.
This is one Henry Shaw’s library and herbarium. It has been restored to its original Victorian charm with dark wooden and glass cabinets, and graced by a ceiling painted exquisitely with the flora and fauna found throughout the garden. All of the Garden’s cherished antique, porcelain birds are here looking as though they could fly if the cabinet doors were suddenly opened. Solemn portraits of men in wigs, who seem like they would be quite capable of smiling if released from the ornate, heavy frames, line the walls. They are famous botanists, one and all. I walk silently around the room and breathe in the history of lovely things.
The Restored Library and Arbarium of Henry Shaw
Henry was a man who hailed originally from mid 19th Century England, but whose father failed at business and fled to Canada where he settled into a hardware business. One fateful day a shipment to the United States got lost in transit and he sent his capable son, Henry, down to New Orleans to retrieve it. On his way down the Mississippi River, Henry stopped in St. Louis, Missouri. This was the time of the great Western expansion, and clever Henry, who, unlike his unfortunate father, excelled at business, decided to settle here and open a hardware store for all the families traveling west. It was a genius move. In short, Henry became a millionaire in his fifties by selling wrought iron stoves; the epitome of practical American ingenuity and know how.
Yet, somewhere in Henry’s soul was a dreamer. Henry dreamed of flowers, trees, little streams, and golden sunlight through leaves. I think when he was a young man, he must have spent time at the Royal Botanical gardens in London and fell happy prey to their enchantment; an enchantment that was not dimmed later by the press of business or the mundane nature of wrought iron stoves. How many days behind the counter did he plan his future garden in his head like every gardener down through the ages? How often did he dream of roses while selling hammers and nails, or of lily pads gracing ponds, or tall, stately trees with dancing leaves, or hidden paths through whose fragrant secluded bushes lovers’ trysts would be overheard and kept secret.
His dream came true. Henry eventually locked up his hardware store forever one day and began a new life’s journey. He traveled to England and began to plan for his own garden in St. Louis. He returned with a few botanists and horticulturists to help him. And the garden grew over time. He built his home there. And here he built his library, an exact replica of a building he loved once in the Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew in the south of London.
The interior of the Library building with the restored painted ceiling
During quiet evenings among his books and his careful cuttings of plants for study, he read about dreamers like himself. Naturalists with names like Linnaeus, Engelmann, Magnol, and Gurney. It is their faces I see dwelling placidly in ornate frames all around the library walls as I walk there.
One face in particular engages my imagination. His name - Pierre Magnol, a French physician and naturalist who lived most of his life in the late 17th century. These were fantastic years of discovery both in science and medicine. The world seemed brand new everywhere you looked. New flowers and plants were being discovered each day all over the known world - and always there awaited the possibility of more unknown worlds beyond. Magnol was part of this exciting time when plants, animals, trees, flowers, were quickly amassed by flora obsessed royalty and landed gentry. A rare orchid or lily could, in some ways, be as cherished as their jewels. They generously displayed them for others to see in their estate green houses - thus establishing the first Natural History Museums. People flocked by the hundreds to examine and exclaim.
It was a wondrous time to be a scientist. And a dreamer. There was still the magic word, “discovery,” in the air like so much fairy dust. Audubon was discovering birds by the hundreds in America and frantically attempting to paint them all for posterity. Catholic missionary priests like Peter DeSmet were gathering cuttings and sending them back to Europe to be studied. Everywhere there was a wonder for the world. No need yet to even think of the moon or space. The earth was mysterious enough and awaited exploring minds with her still hidden gifts. This is the glory of the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries. When humans woke to the possibility of meeting something new and grand each day.
Pierre Magnol
Pierre Magnol was a blessedly gifted human being who immersed himself in nature and reveled in find after find. But the one important thing Monsieur Magnol did, with fortuitous insight, was to begin naming the flowers and trees and organizing them under different species and categories. Oddly enough, that is how I made his acquaintance as I walked the library floor. His name looked familiar to me, and well it should. The Magnolia blossom was named after him in honor of his illustrious career in categorizing. That beautiful, waxen blossom of white with the elaborate gold center was given his name because he was a father of botanical names. How fitting his own should grace a flower so beautiful. Pierre Magnol loved names.
Part of me felt oddly off kilter. Wasn’t that fairy flower always named the Magnolia? Did it not grow up from the ground with that magical name already attached? I am such a child of unobservant modernity. I live in a world I assume to be completely circumnavigated and discovered - a world petrified in the finality of categorization. I don’t ask about names that are attached to things anymore. I presume they have always existed. Words for things are set in stone by some ancient, nameless, appointed Patriarch, and I have never pondered too deeply that at one time those words - were not. Someone, perhaps a someone most ordinary, gifted with extraordinary curiosity, spoke those words into existence and attached them to newly discovered, wonderful things and everyone around him agreed that yes, this was a very good thing. The name told of discovery and joy and surprise at a world of treasures to be sought and found - a shared expression of communal gladness in creation. Treasures that deserved the permanence of a name. For, a name can be viewed as simply wonder captured in ink. A way of saying to the Creator, “I saw! And thank you.” A way of saying to each other, “You thank Him, too.” This idea of newly minted words took hold and grew about my mind in fascinating twists and turns.
I wanted that language of discovery with a newfound urgency. I wanted to be an explorer. I wanted to discover something that had never been discovered and give it a name. I told Monsieur Magnol as much as I looked up at his painting one morning. “Is there no new land to discover? Have we named everything on earth?” I said rather sadly. I swear he smiled in that wry way Frenchmen have.
Not two weeks later, I received a handsome, small, black and gold volume in the mail entitled: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. My son, Ben, a dictionary lover from way back, said I would love it. He was, as usual, correct. I opened the cover one quiet morning onto a whole host of newly minted words I had never seen before. They were John Koenig’s words. This lovely, modern explorer of my own times had gone on a grand adventure and had come back to tell me what he saw. He had me at the first paragraph:
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of new words for emotions. Its mission is to shine a new light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being - all the aches, demons, vibes, joys, and urges that are humming in the background of every life.
John Koenig had not gone OUT to the wide world. He had turned inward and began walking the somewhat wild and undiscovered path of human emotions. A world as vast and complicated as any continent traveled by our ancestors. A world rife with the mystery of our heart’s core. And…discoveries awaited. I was not too late. I followed him in without a glance backward. Emotions of every kind floated by us. Some large and nebulous that carried a vague import. Some seemed so familiar, some more obscure in my own soul but seen once in another’s. Some, the most exquisite, seemed to vanish as soon as they came into view - as is the capricious way with emotive loveliness. It is as maddening as a butterfly refusing to light.
Then Koenig began to capture them in his net of delicious words like: Vellichor, ruckkehrunruhe, Idlewild, aubadoir. All names for feelings we have felt passing through the dimness of our heart. Feelings that show how human we are and how strange and beautiful our reactions to the world are! And as he named, he defined. I watched in fascination. It was like dropping ink on invisible beauty and watching it slowly appear before the eyes. Captured. It filled me with the deepest gratitude that I could now go back and find a concrete word for a flitting feeling and contemplate deeper and deeper understanding there. A misty kind of fancy had turned into solid food for thought. Words are powerful that way. They give us a human foothold to self discovery.
Page after page we explored this new inner world together. I began to see that we were in an entirely different land. A land of abstract things. These were not concrete discoveries like plants and animals. These were emotions: not unlike shy, skittish, woodland animals hidden in the bracken. The mind that would name them must be patient, observant and quiet and not step back too quickly at what it found; be it warm, inviting, awkward, or fierce. Koenig was a master. He knew this land and intimately for he had learned to wait and ponder. I read on with greater and greater enthusiasm.
I discovered that there was a word for “that feeling of returning from an immersive trip only to notice it fading rapidly from the awareness, as if the brain had automatically assumed it was all just a dream and already went to work scrubbing it from its memory.” I felt this acutely when I returned once from a wonderful stay at a peace filled Monastery. The feelings I had there faded so quickly though I was trying so hard to grasp them tightly. As though the feeling of peaceful eternity only went as far as the property line and waved to me in wistful apology as I drove back into the world. I didn’t know then, but I know now I was feeling ‘ruckkehrunruhe’. A word coined from the German root ruckkehren, coming back + Unruhe, restlessness.
I discovered a marvelous word to describe the look I once saw spreading across my friend’s face as he recounted to me a nasty spill he had with his bike on a secluded bike trail. He had wiped out in a puddle, scraped up his legs, and limped away with a bruised bike and hip. But the look on his face was all joy and enthusiasm. Like he wanted at that very minute to jump on his bike and have another go! I would have recounted this tale with a sense of dread from my temporary wheelchair. My friend looked as though he relished every single minute of the Re- telling. Undoubtedly he was feeling Scabulous: “proud of a certain scar on your body, which is like an autograph signed to you by the world grateful for your continued willingness to play with her, even if it hurts.” I knew him better now for that word. He was, in a sense, a new discovery.
I found words defining feelings of content, or sad feelings, wistful feelings, feelings of triumph, of deep reverence, of longing, of a yearning for things not yet even dreamt of in my imagination like his word for the frustration at not being able to fly. I felt so strangely comforted that someone had taken time to name and define these feelings stirring within my own heart, with new and glorious words of his own making. They were words that bound us together in a common gratitude for being so intricately made in ways so very like, yet unlike, our fellow human beings.
I finished the last page and closed the cover feeling quite looseleft, John Koenig’s minted word for a, “sense of loss upon finishing a good book, sensing the weight of the back cover locking away…. all you’ve gotten to know so well.” Yet, I also felt the triumphant exhaustion that any explorer would feel upon their return from an adventure. I immediately wanted to pass this book on to another, would-be explorer who, like me, thought there was nothing left to discover and to widen their world to the possibilities of new named realities under the sun.
I found myself meandering down that familiar garden path a few days later, to the brick and stone Victorian building in the middle of Mr. Shaw’s garden. I found Monsieur Magnol and breathlessly declared, “I’ve been on an adventure: in a rare, vast, and beautiful land. I know now how you feel! I have names.”
Thank you, John Koenig, for reminding me that the adventure is never over. That within us there will always be something new to name and define, that we may grow in awe and gratitude at being so, “fearfully and wonderfully made.” This land of inner landscapes wide and large with love and longing that are waiting to be traveled and named by brave explorers in our time.
